News

The company says the new funding from the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) will help them to “accelerate” their ongoing full fibre rollout

Today, altnet Hyperoptic has announced a new £150 million investment from the UKIB to continue rolling out fibre-to-the-home across the country.

This additional funding increases the company’s total raised this year to £255 million, and total overall to £1.1 billion. The funding follows a report in February in which Hyperoptic said they were seeking to raise an additional £500 million to further fund their rollout.

At a time when investment in fibre has largely dried up, Hyperoptic says this latest investment represents continued support for the company’s business plan.

“Since 2011, we’ve been on a mission to bring ultra-reliable, hyperfast full fibre broadband to businesses and consumers across urban areas and new developments in the UK. We’re acutely aware of the government’s target to achieve 99% gigabit-capable broadband coverage by 2030 and, as an industry, we still have some way to go to achieve it,” said Dana Tobak CBE, CEO and Co-Founder of Hyperoptic. “We welcome the support of the UK Infrastructure Bank, together with other investors, enabling us to continue delivering award-winning gigabit-capable broadband to more people across the UK every day.”

“Reliable internet connectivity is increasingly important to participate in the modern economy and drive forward the UK’s net zero and regional growth ambitions. Our investment in Hyperoptic will ensure that the scale and pace of the full fibre rollout is sustained, specifically in those areas where it’s needed the most, opening up opportunity for numerous communities across the UK,” added Ian Brown, Head of Banking & Investments at UKIB. “We hope that our commitment will help mobilise further private debt financing for Hyperoptic’s continued network expansion.”

Since its foundation in 2011, Hyperoptic has grown to be one of the largest altnets in the UK, with a full fibre network that passes 1.73 million homes and serves roughly 340,000 customers. The company is aiming to increase these figures to 2 million and 500,000, respectively, by the end of this year.

The new investment represents something of a reinvigoration for Hyperoptic, with the company having last year cutting 110 jobs and extended their build timeline due to the challenging operating environment.

Join Hyperoptic CEO Dana Tobak in discussion at this year’s Connected Britain conference, the UK’s largest digital economy event

Also in the news:
Australian Government and AWS Collaborate to Strengthen country’s Cybersecurity
Solving congestion challenges in FTTP deployment
Vodafone Invests £120m in AI Chatbot ‘SuperTOBi’

VIEWPOINT

During the Digital Transformation World (DTW) summit, Huawei partnered with the TM Forum to host the Green Development Forum. Representatives from leading telecom operators such as South Africa’s Openserve, Hong Kong Telecom (HKT) and GSMAi (GSMA Intelligence), gathered to discuss the green transformation and enable sustainable development across the industry.

Discussions at the Green Development Forum

As society rapidly enters the AI era, global network operators not only need to fulfill their social responsibility of reducing carbon emissions, but also help other industries achieve energy savings and efficiency improvements. For example, 5G-A technology has already been applied in high carbon emission industries such as mining, construction, and electric power industry, playing a crucial role in the process of energy conservation, emissions reduction, and digital transformation.

Opportunities and Challenges for Green Development in the ICT Industry

In her opening remarks, Cecilia, the lead of TM Forum’s “People & Planet” theme, outlined TM Forum’s sustainable development strategy for the next two years, focusing on three topics: Artificial intelligence, Net Zero, and ‘Positive impact & cultural change’. TM Forum also announced the launch of the Moonshot Catalyst Award, which will specifically focus on driving the telecom industry towards Net Zero by 2030.

GSMAi’s Chief Analyst, Emanuel, presented the results of his assessment of the energy efficiency of dozens of global networks, the distribution of energy sources, and the indicator system for measuring network energy efficiency. He also provided several recommendations for improving energy efficiency, such as site simplification, spectrum refarming and user migration, advance cooling solutions, and AI & resource optimization, etc.

Green Development Practices of Global Leading Operators

Ashvir, the Network Quality Director of South Africa’s Openserve, introduced their excellent practices in the green transformation of Central Offices (CO). In the face of unstable grid power, they optimized their network architecture, utilized renewable energy, and fine-tuned AI algorithms to not only reduce carbon emissions, but also lower overall energy consumption and operational costs, while ensuring the continuous availability of network services.

Derek, the VP of Hong Kong Telecom (HKT), shared HKT’s green governance philosophy and introduced their “Integrated Smart Energy Solution” that enables vertical industry customers to support their green development plans.

Green Network and Operations Solutions

Singleton Zhou, the President of Huawei’s Global Technology Service Network Consulting and System Integration, delivered a presentation on “Build Digital and Intelligent Network, Enable Green and Sustainable World”. He shared the latest progress of global operators in the green transformation of networks, Huawei’s Green Target Network solution, and the GNED integrated platform based on digitalization and intelligence, providing operators with comprehensive solutions for green network evolution.

Mr. Singleton Zhou shared the Green Target Network Solution

During the panel discussion, representatives from Huawei, GSMA, Openserve, and HKT had a lively discussion on the challenges facing the green transformation of the telecom industry and the needs for ecosystem collaboration. They unanimously agreed that the ICT industry should widely collaborate to build a green governance framework, and green standard system, supporting the green transformation of the industry and enabling other industries to reduce carbon emissions.

Looking forward, Huawei’s Intelligent Connectivity Integration service will continue to uphold the “Less for More” principle, building a unified green development framework and standard system, and creating a digital and intelligent green operations platform to support operators in charting the blueprint of the Green Target Network and the path of comprehensive green evolution, enabling operators to achieve their strategic goals of green development.

A new critical security vulnerability has been discovered in the popular RADIUS network authentication protocol, which is used by networks across the world to help users connect with their services (i.e. everything from broadband ISPs to VPNs, mobile operators and more) and thus could leave them exposed to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) style attacks.

The vulnerability, which has been dubbed BlastRADIUS by InkBridge Networks (FreeRadius), appears difficult to exploit. But its impact could still be significant if network operators and network administrators who use RADIUS don’t patch their software and devices to protect against the new threat.

The vulnerability is said to stem from a thirty-year-old design flaw in the RADIUS protocol (i.e. some Access-Request packets are not authenticated and lack integrity checks) and exploiting this “allows an attacker to authenticate anyone to your local network“, which is obviously not good. Suffice to say that it’s been given a Common Vulnerability Score (CVSS) of 9 out of 10, which is extremely high.

However, in order for such an attack to succeed, the attacker has to be able to modify RADIUS packets between the RADIUS client and server. But, even if they did that, such attacks would still be costly and likely to “take a significant amount of cloud computing power to succeed” (catch – those with more resources may still consider it viable to do, such as if the target is to steal credit card data for financial gain etc.).

Statement by FreeRadius

The attack is hard, because it is a “man in the middle” attack, which means that the attacker has to be able to both see, and modify Access-Request packets. If the attacker can do that, then your network is already compromised.

Even better, the attack requires substantial CPU resources to do i.e. $1000 of CPU power per packet being attacked, and the attack isn’t even guaranteed. There is also no public exploit available for “script kiddies” to run. It is extremely unlikely that anyone other than nation-states have the capability to perform the attack at this time.

However, if you are running PAP / CHAP / MS-CHAP and RADIUS/UDP over the Internet, then your users have likely been compromised for decades. There is little more we can say about that.

In order to fully protect your systems from the attack, you must update all RADIUS servers, and all RADIUS clients. The attack relies on a design flaw in the protocol. Fixing it requires updating all RADIUS implementations to the new behavior. In many cases, you do not need to panic and upgrade everything immediately. See below for more details.

Even considering the limited nature of the attack, everyone should plan on installing all firmware updates for each NAS device (including switches, routers, firewalls, VPN concentrators, etc.) which uses RADIUS. The important thing in the short term is to upgrade the RADIUS servers, determine if your network is still vulnerable, and then take action to address those vulnerabilities.

At present there is only a proof-of-concept exploit for this that has been developed by the researchers and the exploit itself is not yet publicly available. Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting.

Mobile operator Vodafone UK conducted another trial of Network Slicing technology on their latest 5G Standalone (SA) powered mobile broadband network at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, which despite heavy network load was able to dedicate a “slice” of capacity to help drink vendors speed up card transactions.

Most existing 5G networks in the UK still have some dependencies on 4G, which slow them down and are known as Non-Standalone (NSA). By comparison, 5G Standalone (5GSA) reflects a pure end-to-end 5G network that can also deliver improvements such as ultra-low latency times (fast), better mobile broadband upload speeds, network slicing capabilities, better support for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, increased reliability and security.

Vodafone has already conducted a number of Network Slicing trials on their newest 5GSA network and the Glastonbury Festival, with its high data usage, represented another opportunity. In fact, the operator reveals that festival-goers consumed over 225 TeraBytes (TB) of data during the event (up 33.14% on 2023), which put a huge load on their Cells on Wheels (COWs) masts and network setup (particularly during Coldplay’s headline performance when over 258GB of data was uploaded).

Building a telecommunications network for over 200,000 people in a small area is naturally a complex task at the best of times, particularly when you have to both cater for visitors and keep on-site businesses connected to vital services at the same time. As such, the operator also used the festival to test whether dedicating a portion (slice) of the network to keep EBC payment machines connected would work (EBC managed 10 on-site bars).

Ryan Kingsley, Stock Manager at EBC, said:

“Running some of the busiest bars at Glastonbury, it is so crucial that we have a stable data connection with the capacity to operate our tills. The Vodafone slice ensured that the three bars supported in the demonstration had that stable data connection and helped us serve our customers faster than ever before!”

The slice was optimised to support the maximum number of concurrent transactions during peak busy periods and was protected from the risk of wider network congestion at the event. The result was that payment machines were not impacted by general data usage, meaning customers were served faster and didn’t need to spend as long in a queue.

Real-time connectivity is crucial to authorising card payments. Without real-time authentication of payments, it is estimated that 4% of revenues can be lost to fraudulent transactions.

Broadband ISP and mobile network operator EE (BT) has today launched a new technology service for Pay Monthly mobile customers called ‘Scam Guard’, which is a network-level security defence that harness AI to better protect users from “nuisance calls, dark web hackers and phishing scams“. But it’s not free.

At present EE already uses a degree of AI based filtering in order to identify and block scams and spams. In fact, each month sees EE block around 15 million suspicious calls and texts before they reach their intended victim. In the first six months of 2024, they have blocked 84 million scam attempts, but sadly some do still get through.

The new Scam Guard add-on goes a bit deeper than that and, for an extra £1 a month, it will work to protect your calls, data and online activity. Customers who take this will also gain access to 3-months of free Cyber Security Duo, covering identity and device protection (explained below).

Scam Guard Features

· Spam and Scam Call Labelling:
Uses an Adaptive AI (Artificial Intelligence) system, powered by Hiya, that analyses every aspect of a call in real-time to detect and notify customers of suspicious calls.

· Dark Web Monitoring:
Alerts you if your personal information, like bank card details and email login info, appears on the dark web, providing breach details and
tips for securing your info.

· Three Months Free Cyber Security Duo:
Offers real-time protection for up to two devices against viruses, malware, online threats and provides tools for stronger password creation and social media security. Identification of unsafe texts with links, personal information monitoring on the dark web and protection of social media accounts are also accounted for. The service includes access to three months of free Cyber Security Duo powered by Norton, who on average block nearly a quarter of a million attacks every day across the UK.

The system will also provide customers with monthly reports and breach alerts.

Helen Burrows, Policy Director for BT, said:

“We have always prioritised the protection of our customers and our investment in Scam Guard is something we are all incredibly proud of. We truly believe it will make a significant contribution to the prevention of scams and fraudsters.

EE was a founding member of Stop Scams UK, and part of a cross-industry alliance to share intelligence on scams. We also employ security experts and network-level security to safeguard our network and customers from cyber-attacks. This is something we take seriously, and while we already block an impressive number of scams, there is always more that we can do.

Scam Guard covers all bases so customers can feel safer on our network.”

Remember, if you receive a suspicious call, put the phone down and try calling back via a trusted number. On mobile phones you can also text the phone number and incident to 7726, free of charge, so your mobile phone provider can investigate. Once reported, remember to block the number and notify others of the scam, so they can avoid falling victim.

News

The newly optimised video delivery is already operational in 11 of Vodafone’s European markets

This week, Vodafone and Meta have announced new measures to optimise the delivery of video content and increase capacity on mobile networks.

These optimisation measures – which have not been detailed – have reportedly been active in 11 of Vodafone’s European markets since the start of June, delivering a ‘meaningful’ reduction in network traffic without impacting video experience quality for customers.

Exactly how much network traffic has been reduced was reported, though Vodafone notes that results will vary “based on several factors including network load and end user devices.”

The move comes following successful tests conducted on in the UK back in April, which saw the optimisation measures applied to both 4G and 5G networks at busy locations. In these tests, a ‘low double-digit reduction’ was reportedly achieved.

“Meta’s willingness to optimise the delivery of video for its applications leads the way for a more efficient use of existing network resources,” said Alberto Ripepi, Chief Network Officer at Vodafone. “Vodafone and Meta have implemented these optimisations across Vodafone’s European markets and intend to continue collaborating to foster additional efficiencies.”

Meta and Vodafone say they will continue to work with one another to further optimise the network, noting they are “open to working with all players in the ecosystem to continuously improve the efficient use of network resources”.

In recent years, one of the hottest topics in the telecoms industry has been the so-called ‘Fair Share debate’, with telcos crying out for big tech companies to help subsidise the deployment and operation of mobile and fixed broadband networks on which they so heavily rely. The telcos’ main argument is that a handful of big tech companies account for the majority of data traffic; a study from the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) back in 2022 found that roughly 55% of all data traffic is generated by just six big tech firms:  Google, Meta, Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

Naturally, much of this data traffic is video content – roughly 73% of all internet traffic, according to Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report – hence this collaboration between Vodafone and Meta is certainly welcome. Indeed, Vodafone is not alone in making such efforts. Telefonica, for example, is also working with Meta to reduce video traffic delivery on its networks.

Do these collaborations indicate that the telcos have given up campaigning for Big Tech to pay its ‘fair share’? Certainly not. But, with the European Commission having delayed making a decision on the topic until at least the end of this year, a pragmatic and cooperative approach to managing ever-growing network traffic is becoming increasingly necssary.

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Also in the news:
Australian Government and AWS Collaborate to Strengthen country’s Cybersecurity
Solving congestion challenges in FTTP deployment
Vodafone Invests £120m in AI Chatbot ‘SuperTOBi’

Mobile network analyst Streetwave has partnered up with the Caerphilly County Borough Council (CCBC) in Wales to harness local refuse (bin) collection trucks in order to map the local network (mobile broadband) performance across the area, which covers services from EE (BT), O2 (Virgin Media), Vodafone and Three UK.

The idea of using bin collections to map 4G and 5G mobile coverage is one that has only recently been implemented. In fact, Streetwave are a key partner on a similar scheme (here) that’s currently occurring across Mid Wales (Powys and Ceredigion), but this idea is one that’s clearly spreading.

The big news today is that Caerphilly has become the “first council in the UK” to also provide a mobile coverage checker, based on a similar method of data collection, for its “residents to check [their] mobile signal” (we expect the same from the aforementioned project in Mid Wales too).

Following coverage complaints from staff and residents, CCBC began working with Streetwave to measure mobile signal quality across the council in September 2023. The use of bin lorries has since enabled the project to complete weekly mobile coverage surveys across every address in the council.

Network quality is now continuously being analysed across the four main mobile operators – covering data points such as throughput speeds, signal strength, and network generation information. Local residents can use the following links to see the exact download and upload speeds that EE, Vodafone, Three and O2 offer within a 30m radius outside of their homes/businesses.

Link to English language coverage checker:
https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/48?lang=en

Link to Welsh language coverage checker:
https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/48?lang=cy

Naturally we had a quick look at this, which returned both an average download and upload speed for the addresses we tested (although you have to click to show uploads in the FAQs – lower down the page). But there’s currently no visual map to help people easily identify weak and strong areas of service performance, as well as no data for signal coverage or 4G/5G availability.

Suffice to say that it’s not, yet, a full replacement for the traditional coverage checkers offered by the mobile network operators, which merely estimate the mobile network quality you will receive at an address via mathematical modelling, and limited surveying. Streetwave also didn’t provide any overall network statistics for the area, which would have been useful to see.

Mobile operator Vodafone has announced that they’ve worked with Meta (Facebook etc.) to trial and deploy a new mobile broadband (4G, 5G) “network optimisation” for “short-form videos” across the UK and 10 other countries, which is said to “free up network capacity” for customers and allows them to “view more high-quality short videos“.

The description “short-form videos” typically tends to reflect the kind of short videos you’d find on services like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and so forth. But Vodafone is saying that, since the start of June 2024, customers in Albania, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the UK should now be finding that these consume less network traffic than before.

The change follows an initial three-week test conducted in the UK during April 2024, where the companies recorded a “meaningful reduction in network traffic for Meta applications across Vodafone’s mobile network“. As a result, Vodafone say they freed up additional network resources on some of their most popular 4G / 5G sites so that all mobile customers at these busy locations, such as shopping centres and transport hubs, benefitted.

At present this appears to be focused primarily on platforms owned by Meta (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), but both Vodafone and Meta said they are “open to working with all players in the ecosystem to continuously improve the efficient use of network resources.”

Alberto Ripepi, Vodafone’s Chief Network Officer, said:

“Meta’s willingness to optimise the delivery of video for its applications leads the way for a more efficient use of existing network resources. Vodafone and Meta have implemented these optimisations across Vodafone’s European markets and intend to continue collaborating to foster additional efficiencies.”

The level of reduction in network traffic is said to vary based on several factors, including network load and end user devices, which is very much stating the obvious and doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the change itself. In fact, the announcement doesn’t provide much of any useful technical information to help us understand precisely what sort of change has actually been made here.

Typically speaking, optimisations like this usually stem from changes in either the video codecs (i.e. better compression of the stream), network protocols or how a Content Delivery Network (CDN) may manage the caching of related content within a network. The fact that Meta is directly involved suggests there’s likely to be a CDN element at play, but we’ve asked Vodafone to provide more details and will report back later.

UPDATE 9:07am

We’ve been informed that the change involves optimising the “average bitrate of high-quality videos without noticeably compromising experience“, which could still be interpreted in different ways but does point a little bit more toward enhancements on the video codec / compression side. A low double-digit reduction (i.e. % of overall Meta-related data traffic) was observed by Vodafone during the brief UK trial, which is still significant when you consider how big Meta is.

The Institute of Customer Service (ICS) have just published their second biannual UK Customer Satisfaction Index for July 2024, which reveals that three mobile and broadband (telecoms) providers made it into their table of the country’s top 50 organisations – Tesco Mobile (20th), Utility Warehouse (23rd) and giffgaff (32nd). But it’s not all good news.

The research typically reflects the results from a large online survey of over 15,000 customers – balanced to be representative of the UK adult population, which asked each of them about their experiences across 282 different organisations (a total of 59,500 responses were gathered). This was then used to produce a score out of 100 for each organisation.

Overall, the “Telecommunications & Media” sector reported another fall in its general ranking – going from a score of 74.7 in January 2024 to 73.3 today. At the same time, Tesco Mobile (scored 81.7) saw their ranking fall from 5th to 20th, while Utility Warehouse (81.4) entered the table for the first time at 23rd and giffgaff (80.7) fell from 23rd to 32nd.

Customer satisfaction in the telecoms and media sector was found to be 2.5 points below the UK all-sector average. The biggest fall in satisfaction in the sector is for complaint handling: the complaint handling dimension is rated at 53.3, a fall of 6.2 points compared to a year ago and 5 points below the UK all-sector average.

In addition, some 19.2% of customers had a problem or bad experience with a telecoms organisation, up by 1.7 percentage points compared to July 2023 and 3 percentage points more than the UK average. Finally, 6 of the 14 Telecommunications and Media organisations that received a UKCSI score are rated at least 2 points lower than a year ago.

Sadly, the full report doesn’t include scores for all the UK mobile and broadband providers surveyed, only those that ranked high enough to be listed in the top tables.

City-focused gigabit broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which has now built a full fibre (FTTP/B) network to cover “more than” 1.73 million homes across parts of 64 UK towns and cities (up from 1.6m on 3rd June 2024), has today secured £150m from the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) to help “accelerate” their network expansion.

The operator, which is now home to a broadband customer base of 340,000 (up from 300,000 on 5th Oct 2023) and is targeting 500,000 for the future, was previously known to be aiming to cover 2 million premises with their gigabit broadband network by some point in 2024 (the previous goal was to hit this at the end of 2023). The latest progress and funding boost suggests they could get close to this target by the end of the year.

Today’s news means that the alternative network provider has raised an additional £255m of debt facilities this year, which is despite the persistence of stubbornly high interest rates that tends to choke the pursuit of fresh investment. The positive development follows a report in February 2024 that claimed the operator was attempting to raise up to £500m of additional capital in order to continue their expansion (here), as well as last year’s redundancies and build disruption (here).

According to today’s announcement, Hyperoptic said their “planned roll out” would now be “placing particular emphasis on connecting more people to the network, bridging the digital divide and providing essential connectivity to communities nationwide.” In particular, they noted that this plan would include a continued focus on connecting social housing premises, which will give more homes access to their cheaper ‘social tariff‘.

Dana Tobak CBE, CEO and Co-Founder of Hyperoptic, said:

“Since 2011, we’ve been on a mission to bring ultra-reliable, hyperfast full fibre broadband to businesses and consumers across urban areas and new developments in the UK. We’re acutely aware of the government’s target to achieve 99% gigabit-capable broadband coverage by 2030 and, as an industry, we still have some way to go to achieve it. We welcome the support of the UK Infrastructure Bank, together with other investors, enabling us to continue delivering award-winning gigabit-capable broadband to more people across the UK every day.”

Ian Brown, Head of Banking & Investments at UKIB, said:

“Reliable internet connectivity is increasingly important to participate in the modern economy and drive forward the UK’s net zero and regional growth ambitions. Our investment in Hyperoptic will ensure that the scale and pace of the full fibre rollout is sustained, specifically in those areas where it’s needed the most, opening up opportunity for numerous communities across the UK. We hope that our commitment will help mobilise further private debt financing for Hyperoptic’s continued network expansion.”

Hyperoptic’s most recent set of annual results, which run to the end of 2022, reported revenue of £78.7m (up from £65.1m) and a gross profit of £62.3m (up from £52.5m), with an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of £26.7 (largely unchanged). But the company also invested £175.4m to grow their fibre network in 2022 (up from £103.1m). The next set of results is due in a few short months.

Residential customers of their service tend to pay from £28 per month for a symmetric speed of 50Mbps on a 24-month term (£30 thereafter), which rises to £39 for 900Mbps (£63 thereafter). The packages also attract a £19 one-off activation fee. Shorter contract options (12 months and 30 days) are available at extra cost, as are phone services.

In addition, two social tariffs on 30-day terms are available for those on state benefits, which will give you 50Mbps for just £15 per month or 150Mbps for just £20 per month – both with free activation.