The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a website ad for Sky’s broadband ISP and subscription-based TV streaming sub-brand, NOW TV (NOW Broadband), after it failed to make clear the “significant conditions” of its free trials, which would automatically auto-renew at a fee.

The promotion itself was for one of NOW TV’s standard Entertainment Membership plans, which showed up after clicking the “Choose your membership” button on the company’s website in December 2023. Upon clicking that button, consumers were taken to a page showing two subscription options labelled “6 Month Saver” and “Fully Flexible”.

The text in a bullet list in the “6 Month Saver” subscription stated “Watch in Full HD on 3 devices at once with 1 month free Boost”, while small text stated: “New Boost members only. After your 1 month free trial Boost auto-renews at £6 a month unless cancelled”. Text in the “Fully Flexible” subscription stated: “Included: 7 day free trial of Cinema and Boost – cancel anytime”, while the small text stated “After your 7 day free trials, membership auto-renew monthly at £9.99 for Cinema and £6 for Boost. Cancel anytime”.

The free trials were automatically added to the basket and would auto-renew at a monthly charge, unless cancelled. But the ASA ruled that the advert was misleading because significant conditions of the offer(s) were all in the small print and did not immediately follow the reference to the free trials.

ASA Ruling Ref: A24-1229858 Sky UK Ltd

We understood that each free trial would auto-renew at a monthly charge, specifically £6 for “Boost” and £9.99 for “Cinema”, unless they were cancelled within the free trial period. We acknowledged that those significant conditions were stated at the bottom of the two boxes detailing each of the streaming packages. When compared, however, to the other text presented in the box, we considered this information was in a smaller font and a less prominent colour.

Furthermore, we noted that the text was positioned at the bottom of the boxes, underneath the buttons to select and purchase the consumer’s desired streaming package. We considered that, because the text was placed away from the references to the free trials and below the button to proceed in the consumer journey, consumers were more likely to overlook the significant conditions of the trials. We considered the presentation of such text made it significantly less prominent to consumers and increased the likelihood that consumers would miss that information.

Because the text outlining the significant conditions of the free trials was not clear in either size or clarity of font and did not immediately follow the reference to the free trials, we concluded that the ad was misleading.

As usual, the ASA banned the advert in its current form and told NOW TV to ensure that their future ads made sufficiently clear that free trials would auto-renew at a fee. Interestingly, this ruling appears to form part of a wider piece of work by the ASA, which is examining online choice architecture and how it impacts consumers (following complaints received and intelligence gathered by the ASA). This goes beyond merely examining static adverts and probes deeper into the selection process.

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The 5,536km-long America Europe Connect  (AEC-1) cable links the US to Ireland and the UK 

Subsea connectivity company Aqua Comms has expanded its network capacity by lighting a new fibre pair on the AEC-1 submarine cable system. The cable, which is Ireland’s first dedicated subsea cable, connects New York, Dublin, and London. 

The move is designed to meet the increasing demand for fast and reliable data transmission between the three nations.  Aqua Comms says the move has also presented an opportunity to reassess the system’s energy consumption, with newly lit fibre pair allowing for greater energy efficiency per Tb. 

“From a sustainability perspective, this new fibre pair has given us an opportunity to really analyse the entire system and supplier network to make significant energy savings,” said Chief Commercial Officer Nick Barton in a press release. 

“Through use of new technology, we will be able to generate more capacity per fibre pair, leading to better performance on power draw per Tb, and therefore a significantly more sustainable system. The system will also reduce regen requirements at our different cable landing stations and simplify backhauls to create a greener path,” he continued. 

Alongside lighting the new fibre pair, Aqua Comms revealed it also has plans to upgrade the system to the latest tech from Ciena in the coming months. AEC-1 currently uses Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme optics, with Aqua Comms planning to upgrade to the next generation, WaveLogic 6 Extreme solution.  

This upgrade is expected to cut energy use per bit by more than 50%, and will allow for a wavelength capacity of 1.6Tbps. 

Join us at next year’s Submarine Networks EMEA, 18-19 February in London. Get tickets here! 

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News

Swisscom first announced the €8 billion deal back in March, and notified the EU in August  

The European Commission has given the green light to Swisscom’s acquisition of Vodafone Italia, without conditions. The clearance, granted under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, is a crucial step toward finalising the transaction. 

The Italian Competition Authority is still reviewing the deal, having launched a deeper investigation earlier this month to assess the transaction’s impact on market competition, Swisscom noted. 

Swisscom expects the deal to be finalised by the first quarter of 2025. 

Once completed, Swisscom plans to merge Vodafone Italia with its Italian subsidiary, Fastweb, creating Italy’s second-largest fixed-line broadband provider, behind market leader Telecom Italia.  

The merger is expected to save around €600 million through synergies related to increased scale and efficiency, Swisscom says. 

Swisscom’s CEO, Christoph Aeschlimann, called the merger a “strong strategic fit”, saying it will add significant value to both companies.  

Vodafone will also continue to provide services to Swisscom for the next five years as part of the deal. 

The transaction forms part of Vodafone’s broader strategic efforts to streamline its European footprint in recent years. This shift has involved selling off or merging various business units across Europe, including the sale of its Spanish business and a merger with Three in the UK. 

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

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Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
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The state-aid backed Superfast North Yorkshire (SFNY) project, which was supported by £100m of investment (£85m from public sources), has finally reached completion and helped more than 200,000 extra premises to access faster broadband speeds via a mix of different technologies (FTTC, FTTP, Fixed Wireless etc.) and operators (Openreach and Quickline).

The SFNY project was managed by NYnet (i.e. the North Yorkshire County Council-owned broadband company) and financed by a mixture of funds from the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, EU, North Yorkshire County Council and some private funding from network suppliers. At the last check in 2022, take-up in the project’s intervention area had already exceeded 80%.

Regular readers might recall that Openreach completed their build contracts under the scheme in 2022 (here), which deployed a mix of fibre-based (FTTC and FTTP) networks to expand the reach of “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) lines into digitally disadvantaged areas (i.e. usually rural locations where there were no commercial builds being planned). This accounted for the lion’s share of the project’s roll-out.

In addition, Quickline also held a contract to deliver the final Phase 4 of the SFNY roll-out (here), which involved a public and private investment of £14.5m and saw the operator extending their “fibre-backed fixed wireless” network to bring “superfast, ultrafast and in some cases gigabit speed broadband” to a further 15,830 premises. But the latest announcement states that this has now also completed.

However, the council’s leader, Cllr Carl Les, warned that a connectivity gap remain and he has thus pledged to petition the Government to “ensure every household and business in the county has access to superfast internet“.

Councillor Carl Les said:

“The need to have access to superfast broadband is now part of everyday life for communities and businesses across the country.

We have had particular issues in North Yorkshire, which is largely down to the vast rural areas in the county. The superfast broadband programme in North Yorkshire has been instrumental in providing far better connections for tens of thousands of people.

It has given a strong foundation for attracting new enterprises as well as helping to ensure that rural communities can remain sustainable in the future.”

Matthew Lovegrove, Openreach’s Manager for Yorkshire and the Humber, said:

“The success of the Superfast North Yorkshire partnership is a great achievement and testament to the team who have worked so hard for the past 12 years.

Our own commercial build is currently building full fibre at pace across the county including Richmond, Skipton, Malton, Starbeck, Pickering, Selby, Scarborough and Harrogate with the services available to nearly half the premises in North Yorkshire. It’s part of our commitment to reach 25 million homes and businesses across the UK by December 2026.”

Quickline CEO, Sean Royce, added:

“The delivery of the Superfast North Yorkshire programme means thousands more homes and businesses, can now access much improved broadband speeds which will change their lives for the better.”

The focus for future deployments has now switched to the more centrally (government) managed Project Gigabit contract (Lot 31) for North Yorkshire, which is worth £73.5m and has already been awarded to Quickline (here). As part of that the network operator plans, over the next few years, to roll-out their gigabit-capable broadband network to cover an additional 36,300 premises in some of the hardest-to-reach areas of the county.

Mobile operator Vodafone UK has today claimed, as part of their efforts to build support for a merger with Three UK, that their joint plans for a nationwide roll-out of 5G Standalone (mobile broadband) technology could save regular road users £2bn a year on fuel and boost productivity through remote working on trains by £1bn (GVA) a year.

At present most existing 5G networks in the UK are Non-Standalone (NSA), which means they’re still partly reliant on some older 4G infrastructure. By comparison, 5GSA reflects a pure end-to-end 5G network that can deliver improvements such as ultra-low latency times, faster mobile broadband upload speeds, network slicing capabilities, better support for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, increased reliability and security etc.

Vodafone has already made 5G SA technology available in the “busy areas” of 23 cities and more than 300 locations across the UK, although it’s currently only accessible to customers with supporting devices on their Ultra plans. But the operator has also pledged, as part of their merger with Three UK, to extend the service to more than 99% of the UK’s population by 2034 and push fixed wireless access (home broadband) to 82% of homes by 2030.

The new modelling, which was put together by WPI Strategy, is designed to support all this by using survey data on the working and connectivity patterns on trains to estimate that there could be up to 28.2 million train journeys every year in the UK where people want to work, but don’t due to poor connectivity. Changing this, says Vodafone, could deliver £1bn in extra productivity for the UK economy.

In addition, the survey claims that 5G SA could help to reduce train delays (good luck with that one!), which would save £10m in delay compensation that Vodafone seems to think would magically be “reinvested into critical infrastructure” instead. Similarly, reduced congestion and journey delays for freight drivers thanks to 5G-connected devices on the UK’s roads would equate to productivity savings of £140m per year for businesses in the sector by reducing traffic, making journeys smarter, and deliveries more time efficient.

Alongside the modelling, a new poll of 2,000 UK adults revealed that 60% say poor mobile connectivity on trains stops people using journeys productively – whether to work, catch up with friends or watch a film.

Andrea Donà, Chief Network Officer of Vodafone UK, said:

“The national rollout of a 5G Standalone network has the potential to transform connectivity on the UK’s roads and railways. Across road and rail alone, it could unlock £3bn a year for the UK through boosted productivity and by saving fuel costs through smoother journeys.

Without the proposed merger between Vodafone UK and Three UK, the UK misses out on an £11bn self-funded infrastructure investment to deliver 5G Standalone to 95% of the population by 2030 and 99% of the UK population by 2034.”

At the end of the day, deploying 5G SA more widely and at a faster pace could deliver various improvements, which is something to be both welcomed and encouraged. But we’d caution against accepting the inflated optimism and hype of these anecdotal reports as an accurate reflection of future reality, since in our experience the real-world outcomes are often a lot more modest and harder to quantify.

As we always say, trying to accurately gauge the economic impact of deploying faster broadband or better mobile is notoriously difficult, not least because most people and services won’t be starting from a point of zero connectivity and many of the most common internet tasks (e.g. online shopping, banking etc.) only need a fairly basic connection. Not that better connectivity isn’t needed, but diminishing returns are a factor.

In the case of road and rail users, many of the benefits described above could similarly be delivered if good 4G and regular 5G coverage was improved. However, connectivity isn’t the only problem that is difficult to solve, since trains can still be crowded, bumpy and generally uncomfortable spaces to be working within – 5G SA won’t fix that.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently gave Vodafone and Three UK a chance to propose solutions for some of the significant competition concerns that they uncovered with the proposed merger (here). The operators are currently preparing a response to that, which is likely to take the form of several key commitments. If the operators can satisfy the CMA, which seems probable, then there’s a fair chance the deal will be approved.

News  

The internal platform, built in partnership with AWS, will help BT to integrate Generative AI (GenAI) models from numerous providers into their operations 

BT’s Digital Unit has launched the GenAI Gateway, a new platform designed to streamline the company’s use of large language models (LLMs).  

Built in collaboration with AWS, the Gateway represents a unified platform offering secure access to advanced AI models from multiple providers including Anthropic, Meta, and Amazon. This, BT says, will allow the company to better integrate AI into its operations, helping engineers to pick the right LLM for each use case. 

By centralising resources, the GenAI Gateway reduces the risk of duplication and simplifies management of AI tools, security settings, and infrastructure. It also includes privacy features, with data stored in the UK and strong safeguards to prevent misuse.  

Hosted on AWS, the platform is designed with strong security features, including UK-based data storage and separate, isolated models for different use cases. The platform also includes safeguards to prevent misuse or inappropriate interactions which ensure the responsible deployment of AI. 

The platform is currently being tested ,with Openreach using it to summarise engineering notes for Ethernet and full fibre jobs, helping to simplify processes and increase productivity. BT’s legal and procurement teams are also using it to assist with contract analysis. 

“AI is helping us reimagine the future of our company. We believe that where our data is a constant, we need flexibility with our LLMs,” said Deepika Adusumilli, Managing Director of Data & AI at BT Group’s Digital Unit in the announcement. 

“GenAI Gateway allows us to tap into this powerful new set of technologies at scale, in a way that is safe, responsible, flexible and scalable, delivering the ambition we have for AI to unlock the human potential within BT Group, today and in the future,” she continued. 

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

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Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
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A network operator called Step Telecoms UK has revealed that they’re planning to build a new gigabit-capable Dark Fibre network and lease it along with duct infrastructure on a wholesale basis to its data centre operator clients, which will initially focus on sites in London, Manchester and Slough (inc. some connections to coastal UK subsea cable landing stations).

The plan was revealed as part of the company’s application for Code Powers from Ofcom, which 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).

However, Step Telecoms UK (10724266) is currently listed on Companies House as being in a “Dormant” state, which usually means that it’s not doing any business (trading) and doesn’t yet have any other income. The business seems to have been in that state since shortly after it was first incorporated, all the way back in April 2017. But the new application suggests this may soon change.

Digging deeper. One of the company’s two active Directors, John Coughlan, appears to be a Director of another business at the same Sheffield address (Unit 3 Rotherside Road) called Oracy Ltd, which claims to be one of the “leading service providers in both telecommunication and [the] electric vehicle charging industry“. We did attempt to load the associated website at https://oracy.co.uk, although it appears to have an invalid security (SSL) certificate. But otherwise there’s not a lot more to add, yet.

Interview

The UK’s wholesale mobile market is changing rapily in 2024, with the Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) ecosystem set to expand to almost 25% of the market.

At Connected Britain 2024, we caught up with Stuart MacLauchlan, Business Development Director at Vodafone Wholesale, about the growth of the UK’s MVNO market and how the shift to eSIM is gaining momentum.

Check out the full interview below

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Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
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CMA questions Vodafone–Three merger after second probe

Neil, reflecting on the transition, said, “After nearly 30 years in the telecoms sector it’s time I stepped down from the front line. I want to welcome Nathan Vautier to Freedom Fibre and wish him every success driving the company forward.

News

According to reports, the sale could raise hundreds of millions of euros

Reports on Friday suggest that digital infrastructure specialist Cellnex is currently in discussions with advisors regarding the potential sale of its French data centre unit.

While the financial details of any potential sale were not revealed, two anonymous sources told Reuters that the deal could fetch “a few hundred million euros”.

According to the company website, Cellnex has over 100 Edge data centres in France, operated by its NexLoop unit, which it acquired in 2020.

Cellnex is the largest telecoms tower operator in Europe, having grown enormously at the start of the decade through a highly aggressive pursuit of M&A.

Since 2022, however, the company’s strategy has changed, moving its focus away from M&A opportunities and instead turning to organic growth.

Over the last year, this strategic shift has seen the company pull back from a number of business units across the continent. Earlier this year, for example, Cellnex agreed to sell Cellnex Ireland to Phoenix Tower International for roughly €1 billion, while also selling its Austrian unit to a specially formed consortium for €803 million.

Cellnex has also sold its private networks unit – primarily made up of  Finnish subsidiary Edzcom – to Boldyn Networks for an undisclosed sum.

Cellnex’s sprawling tower portfolio, which includes over 138,000 towers in 12 countries, accounts for over 80% of the company’s revenue.

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