The Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) has today announced that they’ve invested another £10m into ISP Highland Broadband (aka – Lothian Broadband), which is building a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) network across rural parts of the Highlands.

The provider, which started building in 2022 (here), previously aimed to provide access to gigabit-capable broadband to over 20,000 premises in the Highlands by early 2024. Since 2022 they’ve also completed builds in Alness, Invergordon, Evanton, Tain and many other locations, although we haven’t had a solid build update from them since late last year.

As part of HB’s latest deployment phase, they’re currently building across the Black Isle, Great Glen and the Cairngorms areas. The latest injection of £10m will no doubt help that work to continue.

Avin Rogers, CEO of Highland Broadband, said:

“The Highlands and Islands face unique connectivity challenges, but we view overcoming these barriers as essential for providing what should be a basic service for everyone in Scotland. The Bank’s continued support has enabled us to accelerate our plan to connect these regions, which ultimately helps reduce place based inequality in areas such as education, employment and healthcare.”

Andy Clapp, SNIB Executive Director, said:

“Our support of Highland Broadband’s multi-year effort to connect all parts of Scotland aligns with one of our core missions to increase equality through improving spaces. The installation of gigabit capable networks, which so many of us take for granted, is already having a real-world impact that’s strengthening the threads of Highland communities.”

Residential customers of the service can expect to pay from £34.99 per month (discounted to £29.99) for an unlimited 100Mbps (symmetric) service on a 24-month term, which rises up to £89.99 (discounted to £54.99) for their top 2Gbps tier! Various phone, pay TV and mesh WiFi solutions can also be added at an extra cost.

News

After the acquisition, DigitalBridge will take the company private 

US investment company DigitalBridge has made an offer to acquire Japanese infrastructure firm JTower, in a deal worth JPY93 billion ($631.2 million) according to a Bloomberg report. 

JTower’s board of directors has endorsed the offer, recognising the growing need for advanced telecom infrastructure as Japan prepares for further 5G and 6G technologies. The partnership with DigitalBridge is expected to provide JTower with the financial resources necessary for long-term investments and expansion, particularly in its core areas of indoor infrastructure sharing and tower operations. JTower is currently one of the largest shared infrastructure companies in Japan, owning 7,700 towers in both suburban and rural areas. 

“JTower’s founder and president, Atsushi Tanaka, as well as Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT) and its mobile unit will tender their combined stake of roughly 26% to the take-private deal at ¥3,600 ($24.45) per share, according to an exchange filing. The offer runs from Thursday to Oct. 10,” confirmed the Bloomgerg report. 

Japan’s telecom industry faces increasing pressure to expand coverage across diverse areas, including remote and disaster-prone regions. DigitalBridge’s involvement is seen as a strategic step to address these challenges, as the firm brings extensive experience in digital infrastructure, managing $84.5 billion in assets globally. The partnership is aimed at ensuring JTower can respond to the evolving needs of the industry by enabling the company to make necessary upfront investments for future growth. 

After the acquisition, JTower will keep its current management structure and continue its partnerships with major telecom companies like NTT, Docomo and KDDI.  

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

Also in the news:
LG and KT partner for 6G research
EE’s first 5G small cells go live, masts now deployed at 1,000+ locations across the UK
Optus clashes with AustralianSuper over slow tower build 

Customers of business broadband and hosting provider Fastnet are currently experiencing a “major, wide scale service outage” across their VMWare hosting platform, which is affecting web, email, DNS hosting including cPanel services, Virtual Datacentre and some other services. But connectivity, DSL and Ethernet services are said to be “unaffected“.

At the time of writing, Fastnet’s service status page still appears to be offline and the ISP has instead replaced the front page of their website with a full-screen notice about the problem, which is rarely a good sign. The situation appears to have started last night at around 7-8pm and the vendor of their VMWare platform has been called in to assist with resolving it.

According to the most recent update, which was posted at 10:32am today: “Specialist engineers have arrived at our affected site and are progressing with their diagnosis, working as fast as possible to facilitate system recovery of our most essential services. We still cannot provide an ETA at this time.”

However, despite the ISP stating that their connectivity services are “unaffected“, the provider has also said: “Broadband customers that currently have working internet connections are advised NOT to reboot their routers in order to troubleshoot issues with our other services as this may cause subsequent reconnections to fail and take your connection offline.”

UPDATE 5:21pm

The most recent update, which was posted at 4:45pm, states: “Engineers are continuing work to activate the DR plan. We apologise for the impact to your services, and will keep this page updated with progress.”

At present there is still no indication of how long this will take to resolve, which must be quite worrying for their customers.

UPDATE 15th Aug 2024 @ 7:46am

The latest update, which was posted at 7:27am this morning, suggests that they’ve had to build some sort of new ‘recovery infrastructure’ to resolve the issue (the details are extremely vague): “The recovery infrastructure is now available, and engineers are working on data migration to the new environment.” But still no ETA for a resolution.

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has just announced that they’re planning to launch their first symmetric 1Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP packages, albeit initially only in “certain locations” from April 2025. Some of the first premises to benefit will be those covered by their rural Project Gigabit contracts (here).

Openreach’s full fibre network has so far covered 15 million premises (there are around 32.5m across the UK), but they aim to reach 25 million by December 2026 and have also expressed an ambition to reach “up to” 30 million by 2030. But the fastest FTTP package currently available to consumers on this network gives a top download speed of 1.8Gbps and 120Mbps upload (220Mbps for businesses).

One of the reasons why Openreach hasn’t yet offered anything faster, including true symmetric speeds (i.e. the same download and upload rate), stems from their use of a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) – this places limitations on how fast they can go before capacity becomes an issue.

For example, GPON supports a capacity on each trunk line of up to 2.5Gbps downstream and 1.24Gbps upstream, which needs to be shared between several premises. By comparison, many of their competitors are already busy deploying 10Gbps capable XGS-PON technology (the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for symmetric speed), which is a significantly faster, more cost-effective and power efficient technology.

However, at the end of 2023 the then boss of strategic supplier ADTRAN revealed (here) that Openreach were adopting a ComboPON approach, which would make it easier for them to upgrade without needing to change all of the existing optical modems (ONTs) inside homes that they’ve deployed via GPON (e.g. they’ll be able to use either GPON or XGS-PON based ONTs, whatever the situation requires). But there was no sign of faster packages, until today.

Matthew Sledge, Openreach Product Manager, said:

“Last year we successfully launched to Communication Providers (CPs) new download speeds of up to 1.8Gbps over our Full Fibre network and we’re keen to continue pushing the capabilities of the network so we can further diversify our portfolio and offer our CP customers, and their own end customers a broader choice of competitive fibre based products.

At the current time we are focusing the new product on a deployment in selected Project Gigabit Type C areas, where we can assess demand and usage.

With broadband data usage growing year on year, we’re also planning for the future, and have recently engaged our Communications Provider customers on the next phase of Full Fibre network architecture, e.g. XGS-PON. We are seeking their feedback on what end customers future speed requirements might look like.”

Openreach aren’t yet ready to offer any further details, except to confirm that any end customers signing up to the new 1Gbps symmetric service will be able to use their existing ONT. Otherwise, the related pricing and commercial terms for the new product(s) “will be confirmed in due course“.

We’re currently trying to confirm this, but we suspect that the first products will form part of a trial / pilot in the aforementioned Project Gigabit build areas. This is because it would be very unusual for an operator of Openreach’s size to skip right to a full commercial launch, especially one with only limited availability. Pilots like this can last anything from 3 months to a couple of years.

The Project Gigabit Type C (Cross-Regional) contracts – worth up to £800m – for that build could eventually see Openreach expanding out to reach an additional 312,000 premises in hard-to-reach UK rural areas, with the first premises under these due to gain access to gigabit-capable broadband in “early 2025“. This closely aligns to their April 2025 date for the symmetric speed service.

Once deployed, we may see faster speeds than 1Gbps symmetric (or even 1.8Gbps asymmetric) become available in the future, although not every part of their network is currently ready to support symmetric performance. But that’s before we consider that it may take ISPs and wholesale suppliers (e.g. BTWholesale, TalkTalk, Zen Internet etc.) time to adapt to such products and the higher capacity demands involved.

UPDATE 2:18pm

Openreach has informed ISPreview that they’ll be “going straight to launch in April” because, they say, there aren’t any commercial or technical reasons to start it with a trial/pilot. But they did suggest that they’d probably still be monitoring the first few orders to checks speeds up/down etc. In addition, this should still be taken within the context of its limited initial availability.

UK ISP LilaConnect, which following the VXFIBER acquisition is now part of Freedom Fibre‘s growing UK full fibre gigabit broadband network (here), has announced to ISPreview that they’ve just surpassed the milestone of 15,000 connected customers (up from 13,000+ at the end of June 2024). Take note that other ISPs also sell over the FF network.

LilaConnect states that, over the past year, the retail ISP has increased new orders by 90% and witnessed a 300% growth in Active Subscribers. But we should add that their availability is still limited to their previously VXF linked network areas, which reflects their footprint across Stoke-on-Trent, Bristol, Colchester, Wivenhoe, Crewe, Nantwich, Leek and Uttoxeter.

However, the provider is working to expand availability across Freedom Fibre’s whole network footprint, which should hopefully follow in the not-too-distant future.

Jan Lange, MD of LilaConnect, told ISPreview:

“At LilaConnect we understand the important part we play in helping to eliminate the digital divide by ensuring everyone in the community has access to fit for purpose and future proof connectivity. We’re proud to have hit the impressive milestone of our 15,000th customer.

Our work is certainly not done – the next step is to get even more homes and businesses across the UK connected to this essential full fibre network. Added to this, faster connectivity speeds are on the horizon to align with ever-evolving technological innovation and the exponentially increasing number of connected devices.”

Residential packages typically start at £24.98 per month on a 24-month term for speeds of 250Mbps, which rises to £69.98 for their top 2.5Gbps plan. But take note that the 2.5Gbps service appears to attract an additional one-off “startup cost” of £99.98.

Rochdale-base broadband ISP Zen Internet has today become the first national provider to sign a wholesale deal that will enable them to sell services to premises covered by alternative operator Trooli, which has deployed a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 370,000 homes and businesses across parts of England and Scotland.

Trooli’s network is mostly found in towns and large semi-rural villages across parts of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Dorset, East Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, West Sussex and Wiltshire in England. As well as parts of North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire and Fife in Scotland (this bit was formerly part of Axione UK’s network, before the merger – here).

Meanwhile, Zen Internet has, until now, only sold packages to consumers and businesses that are based on broadband products from Openreach and CityFibre’s much larger national networks. But they’ve today announced that they’ll also be adding Trooli’s full fibre network to that list.

The move is interesting because Trooli was previously more of a vertically integrated operator that acted as both a network builder and retail provider, which can sometimes make it harder for retail ISPs to agree a wholesale deal with attractive enough commercials and terms (note: Axione UK did already offer a wholesale solution via Scotnet Fibre, but only in Scotland).

Andy Conibere, CEO of Trooli, said:

“We are delighted to be partnering with Zen, one of the largest retail ISPs in the UK, as our businesses are so well aligned. Our network is ready for service so this new partnership allows Zen Internet to expand its customer reach and quickly connect its customers to a high performing network.

Our teams are leaders in their field, very experienced at exceeding the needs of wholesale partners and this partnership is a significant step for Trooli’s wholesale business. Unlike many altnets we are continuing to build our network to areas of the UK that will benefit from it the most and are dedicated to the innovation required to provide access to the fastest and most reliable full fibre broadband.”

Richard Tang, CEO of Zen Internet, said:

“This is an exciting time for our industry as we are experiencing the last major infrastructure rollout of our generation. By joining forces with Trooli as a wholesale partner, we’re enabling access to high-quality broadband infrastructure for homes and businesses in previously underserved areas.

Trooli’s commitment to delivering essential infrastructure to rural and semi-rural regions is facilitating digital access to communities that would otherwise be left behind. Through this partnership we’re proud to offer our award-winning services as an attractive alternative, providing greater consumer choice for these premises.”

At the time of writing Zen Internet hasn’t revealed any details of the packages or prices they’ll be offering, which will no doubt follow in the not-too-distant future. But the pair have published a new interview between the CEOs of each company, which reveals more about today’s agreement and we’ve published that below.

Retail ISP Hey! Broadband, which caters for areas covered by F&W Networks‘ (Fibre and Wireless) new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines – mostly across the South East of England, has for the first time recently revealed that they’ve managed to grow their customer base to total over 25,000 on the new network.

Customers of the service typically pay from £23 per month for a 150Mbps (symmetric) package, which rises to £33 for 400Mbps and then £26 (discounted from £43) for 900Mbps on a 24-month term. Each package includes a router and free installation. However, new customers are currently being offered an additional discount, which will give you the first three months of service for free.

F&WN has so far managed to extend their full fibre broadband infrastructure to cover 410,000 UK premises (RFS) across various towns in London, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, and West Sussex. But we haven’t had any further progress updates on this since February 2024 (partly due to last year’s build slowdown), at least not until Hey!’s recent post on LinkedIn via Fibre Provider.

Lourdes Saez, CEO of Hey!Broadband, said:

“Our commitment to providing speedy and reliable broadband is what has helped us reach this amazing milestone of 25,000 loyal customers. While many mainstream providers seem focused on raising prices, we believe in affordable internet for everyone.”

Admittedly, though, this does represent a take-up of only 6.1%. But it’s important to remember that Hey! Broadband are NOT the only ISP selling packages via F&W’s network (e.g. Link Broadband, Octaplus, Home Telecom, Fresh Fibre, Merula etc.) and so the overall total may well be higher.

Troubled mobile operator Lyca Mobile, which is a virtual network operator (MVNO) on EE’s platform in the UK, has suffered another major blow this week after the tax authority, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), filed a winding-up petition in the courts against their UK business on Monday.

Just for those who may be unfamiliar with this process, a Winding Up Petition (WUP) is a legal action that is usually taken by a creditor or creditors, which in this case is HMRC, against a company that owes them money. Such petitions are an expensive approach and so are usually only considered as a last resort (i.e. when all other approaches to settle a debt have failed).

The move, as first reported by City AM, comes shortly after a Tax Tribunal ruled in HMRC’s favour over a £51m (aggregate) dispute related to the VAT treatment of customer “bundles” that were sold over a period of around 7 years (here). The company’s most recent accounts (here) noted that Lyca had made a provision of £99m to reflect their current best estimate of exposure.

The same accounts revealed that the operator, which has previously donated over £2.1m to the Conservative Party, had 1.7 million UK subscribers at the end of 2022, a churn rate of 9% and revenues of £145m (up from £138m). But they also made a loss after tax of £25.1m, which compares with a profit of £1.8m in 2021.

The accounts also included an independent auditor’s report from PKF Littlejohn, but the auditor stated that they had “not been able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion” (i.e. they couldn’t sign off the accounts). Much of that related to the recoverability of a due balance of nearly £150m (here).

The balance included “£105,979,000 due from related parties“, as well as “£41,704,000 due from directors and parties associated with directors” and the “completeness and accuracy of the deferred income balance of £10,870,000” related to creditors.

The development follows last year’s cyberattack (here), recent problems with 5G connectivity (here) and the conviction of Lyca’s French entities for money laundering and VAT fraud – the latter is something the operator is appealing against. Not to mention some UK customers being hit by a spate of recent and suspicious card transactions, although Lyca has strongly denied any directly related breach of their own systems.

On top of all that, we’ve still got the outcome of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) investigation into last year’s cyberattack (data breach) to come. Suffice to say that Lyca’s customers may have some concerns about the company’s future and the state of their services going forward.

Customers of UK ISP Sky Broadband, particularly those who enjoy certain online multiplayer video and computer games, may be interested to learn that the provider has launched a custom-built world (map) created for Fortnite called ‘Sky City‘. This is said to form part of their “ambition to be the #1 broadband provider for gamers”.

According to Sky, the “immersive” new “brand experience” allows players to “find seamless and authentic references to Sky Broadband, alongside other Sky brands, which blend in with and enrich the world without overshadowing the player experience“, which probably sounded exciting to Sky’s marketing team (i.e. actual gamers may have a.. different perspective).

Sky goes on to state that 16 players will enter the Sky City map via a “series of speed rails, a core feature of Sky Broadband” (we’ve never heard of ‘speed rails’ as a broadband feature). The map is said to be designed for rooftop battles, where players use speed rails and launch pads to gain a competitive edge. This unique activation is said to enable Sky Broadband to engage with a “core audience that traditional media isn’t able to reach“.

Apparently, all of this is going to be accompanied by a “series of livestream events which allow players to battle alongside their favourite creators, engage in challenges and win real-world prizes from Sky Broadband,” although none of those prizes are mentioned. Highlights of the tournament will then be posted on Sky UK and “influencer channels” on a weekly basis.

Sunny Bhurji, Sky Connectivity’s Marketing Director, said:

“I’m super excited about the launch of Sky City and the Speed Showdown activation as it once again demonstrates how Sky Broadband is essential to its gaming customers. It’s a first-of-its-kind tournament that really brings streamers and their audiences together and is all powered by Sky Broadband. I can’t wait to see the players in our Sky City Map, created in Fortnite.“

On the one hand, we welcome the inventive and interesting approach of an ISP / media empire creating their own Fortnite map as a means of promoting the brand to gamers. On the other hand, if an ISP really wants to become the “#1 broadband provider” for gaming, then it should be trying to demonstrate or promote that more in terms of its network features, optimisations and router hardware. Easier said than done, of course.

However, for what it’s worth, since the new map went live (yesterday) the activation has generated the following engagement stats:

➤ Total lifetime plays – 111,129
➤ Average playtime – 17 mins
➤ Average island retention – 8.26%
➤ Epic pick ranking – #1

Mobile operator Three UK has today published their latest results to 30th June 2024, which among other things reveals that 4,900 sites (up from 4,700 six months ago) across 656 towns and cities are now live with 5G (62% population coverage) and the average data (mobile broadband) usage per customer increased to 30.5GB (up from 30GB).

The operator has also completed construction of 311 (of which 269 are live) additional sites as part of the £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) project, which is expanding the coverage of 4G services to more residents and businesses in rural locations across the UK.

In addition, Three UK said they’ve now replaced equipment (Huawei) on more than 600 sites (up from 350) to comply with the Government’s requirements for High-Risk Vendor (HRV) legislation (inc. 3k miles of fibre and equipment replaced across the UK), which also means that they’ve hit the July 2024 target for having less than 35% of HRV traffic on their radio network.

Three UK also said that they’ve successfully completed a pilot programme to prepare for the switch off of 3G services, which will itself “begin in September” 2024 – the goal was to switch this network off completely by the end of 2024.

Finally, at least in terms of their network highlights, they’ve expanded their 4G and 5G network in London Underground stations, with network launches at Paddington, Whitechapel, Canary Wharf and Woolwich stations. A total of 44 stations and 45 tunnels are now live.

Robert Finnegan, CEO of Three UK, said:

“We have made progress in the first of half of the year with growth in certain segments such as SMARTY, 5G Home Broadband and B2B.

Despite scaling back our capex, we continued to make a loss driven by the escalating inflationary costs of operating our network. Our cashflows have been negative since 2020 and our costs have almost doubled in 5 years, meaning investment in network is unsustainable.

UK mobile networks rank an abysmal 22nd out of 25 in Europe on 5G speeds and availability, with the dysfunctional structure of the market denying us the ability to invest sustainably to fix this situation. Our merger with Vodafone will unlock £11bn worth of investment in digital infrastructure, creating a best-in-class 5G network for the UK and helping to grow the UK economy.”

As for the financial side of things..

Financial highlights

Revenue up 9% to £1,335m (H1 2023: £1,227m), with net customer revenue up 6% and handset revenue up 10%, driven by customer growth in certain customer segments (SMARTY, B2B and 5G Home Broadband)
Total Margin up 9% to £879m (H1 2023: £808m)
Operating expenses up 5% to £548m (H1 2023: £520m), driven by an enlarged network and cost inflation
Reported EBITDA up 31% to £213m (H1 2023: £163m)
Reported EBIT loss of £30m (H1 2023: £76m loss), a change of -61% y-o-y
EBITDA-CAPEX of -£17m (H1 2023: -£112m) as cashflow has remained negative since 2020
Reported CAPEX of £230m, down 16% y-o-y (H1 2023: £275m)
Active customer base up 3% or 352k y-o-y bringing the total to 10.9m (H1 2023: 10.5m) amidst strong competition from MNVOs and other operators 
Total contract customers up 5% y-o-y to 9.2m (H1 2023: 8.8m) as a result of increases to B2B, 5G Home and SMARTY base offsetting decline in core business areas