The Common Wholesale Platform (CWP), which is a non-profit member-owned organisation that helps alternative broadband networks to provide wholesale services to the UK ISP market, has announced that they’re offering retail ISPs free access to their Common Switching Platform (CSP) until the One Touch Switching (OTS) regulation launch on 12th September 2024.

In case anybody has forgotten. Ofcom’s much delayed One Touch Switch (OTS) system aims to make it quicker and easier for consumers to switch broadband ISPs, regardless of what physical network the provider is using under the hood. OTS is currently set to go live from on 12th September 2024 (here), which is over a year past its originally targeted launch date of April 2023.

The CWP has responded to this by developing a Common Switching Platform (CSP) for retailers to comply with consumer OTS and business Gaining Provider led-Business (GPL-B) Ofcom regulated processes: CWP serves as a Full Management Managed Access Provider (MAP) to the OTS hub, which allows providers to comply with Ofcom OTS and GPL-B obligations and simplify the integration process.

As part of this the CWP has today announced that they’re providing their CSP service free of charge until the OTS regulation launches on 12th September 2024. This initiative allows UK broadband and telephony retailers to test their connectivity, perform integration tests, participate in industry trials and production integration tests towards a seamless OTS compliance.

CWP Statement

This complimentary service period ensures retailers can prepare for the OTS regulation efficiently, demonstrating compliance and enhancing customer growth through improved switching processes. Additionally, CWP offers various wholesale connectivity services, enabling retailers to expand their horizons and grow their network utilisation.

Retailers of consumer broadband services are encouraged to visit cwpuk.org/join and sign up using the discount code ZERO. Terms and conditions apply.

Broadband ISP Quickline, which is building a new gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) and fixed wireless (5G FWA) network across rural and semi-rural parts of the North East and Midlands of England, has confirmed that a further three villages across North Yorkshire have now been connected to their network.

The latest additions include Brearton, Scotton, and Riccall in North Yorkshire. The new fibre across this area is understood to have reached some 1,600 premises (homes and businesses). Residential customers will typically pay from £29 per month on a 24-month term for 200Mbps speeds with free installation, and that goes up to £49 for their top 900Mbps (450Mbps upload) tier. The first 3 months of service are also free.

Quickline is being supported by funding of c.£500m from Northleaf Capital Partners and c.£177m of public subsidy from Project Gigabit (here, here and here). The provider holds an aspiration to cove around 500,000 premises in rural and semi-rural areas across Northern England and beyond with “ultrafast broadband” – via both FTTP and wireless technologies – “by 2025” (here). Some 200,000 of those rural premises will be tackled by their wireless network, with the other half or more coming from FTTP.

Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this one, which also notes that Openreach’s full fibre is also available to some of the homes in these communities.

Brsk, who recently announced their merger with Netomnia, to form the second largest UK
alternative network, is celebrating a new milestone in the West Midlands; now providing over
100,000 homes with access to full fibre broadband.

Across the Black Country and South Birmingham, homes and businesses can now enjoy rapid
speeds and seamless connectivity thanks to brsk’s full fibre. This is a huge milestone not just for brsk, but also for the West Midlands, an area where gigabit connectivity has largely been
lacking until recent years.
Speaking of the rollout, Gary Blunt, Broadband Lead at WM5G – an organisation part of the
wider government Urban Connected Communities Project and an Associate Partner of UK5G; a national innovation network dedicated to the promotion of research, collaboration and the
commercial application of 5G in the UK, said, “It’s great to see brsk have invested £25,000,000
in broadband for the people of the West Midlands. Commercial investment like this is key to
making the West Midlands the best-connected place to live and work. The brsk full fibre
broadband network is future-proofing the connectivity of the Combined Authority area. At WM5G we believe working in partnership and supporting suppliers to build these networks helps ensure that all our homes and businesses can access fast and reliable digital connectivity that they deserve. We look forward to seeing further investment and the ongoing network expansion across the WMCA.”

Speaking of the project to bring the West Midlands up to speed, brsk Regional Head Laura
Richardson said, “With technology playing such an important part in today’s society, I’m
incredibly proud to be a part of upgrading the broadband, to the area that I call home, to the
fastest internet available in the UK.. Full fibre technology not only future proofs us, it enables
Birmingham and the Black Country to continue as technology hubs for the UK.”

Leading the way in how broadband should be, recent winner of “Best Urban Fibre Provider”
category at the 2024 UK Fibre Awards, brsk offers symmetrical upload and download speeds
across all of their packages, in addition to guaranteed no mid-contract price rises, and award-
winning customer service.

From the borough of Dudley to Earlswood in South Birmingham, brsk is continuing to expand
their coverage at pace across the West Midlands, to deliver more homes with future-proof
broadband. With an unabated build engine and no limit on their network footprint, brsk recently added an additional 30,000 premises in the areas of Blackheath and Bearwood in the
Metropolitan borough of Sandwell, further additional areas are to be announced soon.

Nationally, brsk has passed more than 600,000 homes across the North West and West
Midlands, including Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Merseyside, West Yorkshire, Lancashire,
The Black Country and South Birmingham, becoming a leading broadband provider across the
regions.

Check if you can get brsk full fibre here: https://www.brsk.co.uk

KDPOF (leading supplier for high-speed connectivity over fiberoptics in harsh environments) proudly announces its business upgrade and brand-new corporate identity, evolving from ‘KDPOF – Knowledge Development for Plastic Optical Fiber’ to ‘KD – Approaching Shannon’s Limit’. As the company keeps striving for technical innovation and new products, the new image perfectly fits with the ambitious designs, challenges, and future projects.

“Since our founding in 2010, we’ve mastered the path of innovation, dedication, and excellence in high-speed optical network technology for harsh environments,” explained Carlos Pardo, CEO and Co-founder of KD. “The present major step is to evolve from a fabless company to setting up a high-volume production site for semiconductors close to our headquarter in Tres Cantos, Madrid, in Spain.”

Rubén Pérez-Aranda, CTO and Co-founder of KD, added: “With the development of our new IEEE Std 802.3cz compliant multi-gigabit optical transceivers, based on a new paradigm in integrating electronics, photonics, and optics, we’ve become a global benchmark for robust communication needs in the most adverse environments. Now it’s time for an upgrade of our corporate identity to align it with our achievements and future milestones.”

Last Thursday, July 4th, KDPOF successfully announced its rebranding and was honored to have the presence of great personalities such as the Minister for Industry and Tourism of the Government of Spain, Jordi Hereu, the Mayor of Tres Cantos, Jesús Moreno García, and investors who have supported the company from the beginning, such as Bullnet Capital, Caixa Capital Risk, Kibo Ventures, the high commissioner of PERTE CHIP, CDTI agents, and friends of the company.

Approaching Shannon’s Limit

When Carlos Pardo and Rubén Pérez-Aranda founded KDPOF in 2010, they entered new terrain as pioneers in the optical networking sector. Since then, the engineers have always kept exploring the limits of the impossible – striving for innovations nearing the Shannon limit. With their own production facility, KD empowers new paradigms of hybrid integration of microelectronics, photonics, and optics.

The Shannon limit or Shannon capacity of a communication channel refers to the maximum rate of error-free data that can theoretically be transferred over the channel if the link is subject to random data transmission errors, for a particular noise level. Stated by Claude Shannon in 1948, his theorem has wide-ranging applications in both communications and data storage.(1)

Based on this principle and the values of teamwork, excellence, innovation, and passion, the company remains proud of its past achievements and ambitious about the challenges of the future that lie ahead. KD will continue to set milestones in the industry and in the history of high-speed optical communications for the automotive industry.

Optoelectronics Production in Spain

With the 26.8 million Euros IPCEI investment from the European Commission, KD is setting up a packaging plant for optoelectronic devices in Spain. “We’re excited to pioneer the manufacturing of automotive optoelectronics in Spain in high volume, thus reducing the dependency on Asia and US,” explained Carlos Pardo.

Close to its headquarters in Tres Cantos, KD is advancing a high-quality packaging factory for state-of-the-art optoelectronic devices. In addition, the company is opening their first prototype laboratory for testing their own products. The new laboratory was inaugurated a few weeks ago and is equipped with highly qualified machinery for the necessary testing of KD products.

During the day of the presentation of the new corporate identity, Jordi Hereu and Jesús Moreno García took a guided tour to learn about the quality processes that have been carried out in this new workspace for the past few weeks. The encapsulation and testing factory for large volumes will go into operation in 2025. It will be applied for the first time to produce the upcoming transceiver IC for high-speed automotive optical communications, including the new and innovative optoelectronics packaging technology developed by KD.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem

Rome, 10 July 2024

Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators, and Aruba S.p.A, Italy’s leading provider of cloud, data centre, hosting, e-mail, domain registration and PEC (certified email) services, announce the activation of the new Sparkle’s Point of Presence (PoP) at the Hyper Cloud Data Centre of Aruba, the largest data centre campus in Rome, to be inaugurated soon. 

The agreement between Aruba and Sparkle reinforces Rome as a global connectivity hub between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia thanks to the connection with BlueMed, Sparkle’s new cable that increases connectivity in the Mediterranean basin by linking various countries – including France, Greece, Israel and Italy – with landings in Rome, Genoa, Palermo and Golfo Aranci. BlueMed is an integral part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems project. In partnership with Google and other operators, the project is set to establish a new digital infrastructure between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia with extension as far as India, and is among the first projects being implemented on the IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) set up at the G20 summit in September 2023.

Designed with an “open cable system” and “open landing station” architecture, BlueMed ensures maximum openness to other operators and the development of internet traffic interconnection ecosystems. With four fibre pairs and a capacity of over 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, BlueMed offers operators and businesses high-speed, high-performance international connections from Rome to all of Sparkle’s destinations worldwide.

Sparkle’s new PoP was activated at Aruba’s Hyper Cloud Data Centre (IT4), a technology campus located at the Tecnopolo Tiburtino, a district where more than 150 companies operate, ranging from aerospace to ICT, in an environment designed also to support the growth and development of new companies and start-ups. The data centre campus covers an area of 74,000 m² and, when fully operational, will include five independent data centres for a total of 30 MW of IT power, the first of which (DC-A) is already ANSI/TIA Rating 4 certified. Designed to the highest standards of resilience and infrastructure quality, the new hub will use renewable energy, cooling systems and highly efficient equipment.

“With the activation of the new PoP integrated with BlueMed, we intend to respond to the needs of companies and operators that require large international interconnection capacities,” said Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle. “We bring Rome closer to the world’s major connectivity exchange points thanks to a unique, low-latency route to Marseille and Palermo, integrated with the main submarine cables crossing the Mediterranean and other destinations in Sparkle’s global network.”

Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba commented: “We share with Sparkle the aim of serving companies and operators, that need large capacities, with not only connectivity but also space and power within state-of-the-art data centres that are large enough to support even the most ambitious growth plans. Being able to host a Sparkle PoP, with the availability of BlueMed, is an important building block in the consolidation of our data centres as strategic assets at a national and European level, and is perfectly in line with our carrier neutral philosophy. This approach is designed to allow customers to enjoy, in maximum autonomy, extremely reliable and high-performance internet connection solutions, and to foster the development of interconnections that benefit the entire ecosystem, making Rome an additional connectivity hub and an IT and cloud service delivery centre for the capital and all Central and Southern Italy.”

The new PoP – which already hosts important international players – adds to the four existing points of presence in Rome, increasing the capillarity of the metropolitan ring, a protected and redundant system fully integrated with Sparkle’s Tier-1 global IP network “Seabone”. Network operators, ISPs, OTTs, content and application providers can benefit from the range of IP and data services offered by Sparkle, including DDoS Protection – that gives customers the option to self-protect their networks from attacks – and Virtual NAP – which provides virtual access to leading Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) without the need to build proprietary infrastructure.

About Sparkle

Sparkle is TIM Group’s Global Operator, first international service provider in Italy and among the top worldwide, offering a full range of infrastructure and global connectivity services – capacity, IP, SD-WAN, colocation, IoT connectivity, roaming and voice – to national and international Carriers, OTTs, ISPs, Media/Content Providers, and multinational enterprises. A major player in the submarine cable industry, Sparkle owns and manages a network of more than 600,000 km of fiber spanning from Europe to Africa and the Middle East, the Americas and Asia. Its sales force is active worldwide and distributed over 33 countries.

Find out more about Sparkle following its X and LinkedIn profiles or visiting the website tisparkle.com

About Aruba S.p.A.  

Aruba S.p.A. (https://www.aruba.it), founded in 1994, is Italy’s leading provider of cloud, data centre, hosting, e-mail, domain registration and PEC (certified email) services. The company, with wholly Italian capital, has 16 million users and manages a vast infrastructure distributed on 7 data centres that includes 2.7 million registered domains, 9.8 million e-mail accounts, 9 million PEC accounts and thousands of customer IT infrastructures. Aruba PEC and Actalis are the group’s two Certification Authorities, accredited with AgID (Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale) for the provision of qualified services. Aruba’s infrastructure is also qualified by ACN (National Cybersecurity Authority) to handle ordinary, critical and also strategic PA data. In 30 years of activity, Aruba has developed extensive experience in the design and management of high-tech data centres, owned and distributed throughout Italy. The largest is located in Ponte San Pietro (BG) and features green-by-design infrastructure and facilities that comply with the highest security standards in the industry (Rating 4 ANSI/TIA-942, ISO 22237), to which is added the Hyper Cloud Data Centre in Rome, which covers 74,000 m² in the area of the Tecnopolo Tiburtino and at full capacity will include 5 independent data centres. Aruba implements energy-efficient solutions in its data centres, demonstrating its commitment to sustainability and, in addition, produces clean energy through photovoltaic plants and hydroelectric power plants. The infrastructure network also extends across Europe, with a proprietary data centre in the Czech Republic and partner facilities located in France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

For further information, please visit https://www.aruba.it/and social networks Facebook, X and LinkedIn 

Sparkle Media Contacts

sparkle.communication@tisparkle.com

X: @TISparkle

Aruba Media Contacts

Megan Cowlbeck/Lorna Miller 

aruba@rlyl.com

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry for Aruba   

News

According to reports, the network has demonstrated a ten-fold improvement in key communication metrics, including capacity, coverage, and efficiency

This week, a team of Chinese researchers from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications have revealed the ‘world’s first’ 6G field test network.

According to Chinese government news agency Xinhua, ‘the experimental network has demonstrated that semantic communication can reach the transmission capabilities of 6G on existing 4G infrastructure’.

The network is reportedly intended to provide the national research community with a more accessible platform for 6G testing, thereby allowing wider participation in 6G research.

Results so far reportedly demonstrate the network delivering a ‘ten-fold improvement to capacity, coverage, and efficiency’, though it does not specify what this improvement is being compared to. Further details on the test network are slim for now, with the data having been presented by the researchers as a seminar in Mandarin earlier this week.

China’s emphasis on taking an early lead in 6G has been plain to see for a number of years now. Only last week Jin Zhuanglong, head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, listed 6G as a technical area of national focus, alongside other fledgling technologies like humanoid robotics, quantum computing, and brain–computer interfaces.

Indeed, state support for 6G research is already significant. Both academia and the private sector have been heavily incentivised, via a variety of subsidies and tax breaks, to develop the technology rapidly. As of last year, the government has also played a key role in the creation of a dedicated working group comprising a number of government departments and 37 universities, research institutes, and enterprises.

The exact amount of funding being allocated to support 6G development, however, remains unclear.

Nonetheless, the national focus on the technology is seemingly bearing fruit. China’s private sector – primarily Huawei – currently dominates the global market when it comes to 6G patents, accounting for roughly 40% of the global total. China also celebrated another 6G ‘world first’ back in May, when China Mobile launched a satellite into Low Earth Orbit designed to “test 6G architecture”.

Whether all this activity is turning into a tangible lead in 6G, however, remains to be seen. The standardisation process for 6G has only just begun, with commercialisation no expected until 2030 according to both 3GPP and the ITU. If China truly does have a lead in 6G research, it will still be a long time before this translates to a commercial advantage on the global stage.

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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’

Press Release

O-RAN ALLIANCE announces that Dr. Abdurazak Mudesir, Group CTO of Deutsche Telekom, was elected as Chair of the Board, effective on June 25, 2024. Under Abdu’s chairmanship, O-RAN ALLIANCE stays fully committed to its mission to transform Radio Access Networks to be open, intelligent, virtualized and fully interoperable.

Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, with his departure from Deutsche Telekom, has stepped down from the O-RAN ALLIANCE Board Chair. Alex was one of the founding directors of the O-RAN ALLIANCE in 2018. He served as Chief Operations Officer until 2022, and then as Chair of the Board until June 2024. As a renowned thought leader in the telecom industry, Alex greatly contributed to advancing the O-RAN mission. The ORAN ALLIANCE expresses sincere thanks to Alex for his leadership and enthusiasm.

“O-RAN ALLIANCE plays an essential role in the industry by setting an open specification framework and by facilitating the development of an innovative and competitive O-RAN ecosystem,” said Abdurazak Mudesir, Chair of the Board of O-RAN ALLIANCE and Group CTO of Deutsche Telekom. “O-RAN ALLIANCE remains committed to its efforts in architecture design, interfaces and test specifications, open source developments as well as development of the O-RAN ecosystem towards large scale deployments and global impact.”

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

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’

Alternative network operator G.Network, which has spent the past few years building a gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across parts of central London (here), has reportedly engaged investment bankers at Nomura and Jefferies as advisers to help it explore the potential of a future sale.

The news follows shortly after the operator secured an additional investment of £85m from long term equity investor USS to support their “next phase of growth“ (here), which itself was on top of last year’s commitment by the same investor for “up to an additional” £150m (here).

However, despite the funding boost, G.Network only recently resumed their build programme after a long pause and job cuts (here). Many other network operators have suffered similar issues, partly due to high interest rates, rising build costs and an aggressively competitive environment – particularly in urban areas – that can make it harder to grow take-up.

According to a new report on Sky News, G.Network, which has itself declined to comment, are allegedly considering a sale (it’s not the first time we’ve heard of such discussions). Both CityFibre and CommunityFibre are among those that are said to have expressed an interest in acquiring the operator, although CommunityFibre have had plenty of their own problems (here and here) and would be taking on a much bigger risk if they won a bid.

At the end of last month the operator claimed that their business was “performing well and successfully executing against its strategic plan of creating a better-connected London, delivering improvements in revenues, productivity and customer service“. 

Residential customers of G.Network typically pay from £19 per month for a 150Mbps (50Mbps upload) service on a 24-month term with free installation (£24 thereafter), which rises to £30 for their top 900Mbps plan (£35 thereafter). Shorter 12 and 1 month contracts are also available, albeit at extra cost, and a symmetric speed 900Mbps plan also exists.

News

Both Telstra and Optus are set to retire the older network technology in the next two months

Hundreds of thousands of people may be at risk of being cut off from emergency voice services in Australia as Optus and Telstra prepare to sunset their 3G networks.

According to new government figures released this week, around 205,000 active mobile devices in the country are unable to connect to 4G and will therefore become obsolete following the 3G shutdown.

As explained by Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland earlier this year, “the industry has been identifying and contacting customers with these devices; however, there is also a subset of 4G handsets that use 4G for voice and data but are configured by the manufacturer to use 3G for Triple Zero calls.”

“This category of handset is of more concern because it will not be apparent to users that their handset cannot call triple zero after the switchover. They will only discover this during an emergency,” she explained.

It is worth noting that certain demographics and regions in the country will be disproportionately affected by the switch off, include migrants and international students, which typically use handsets purchased abroad.

The switch off itself has been a long time coming, with plans first having been announced back in 2019. Since then, the number of Australian’s using affected handsets has decreased dramatically, particularly following the telcos’ more urgent communications to customers in recent months. In April, the telcos’ estimated around 1 million devices would be impacted, reducing this estimate to around 530,000 in mid-May.

Despite this rapid progress, however, the government insists that the number of affected customers remains too high, suggesting that regulatory intervention could soon become necessary.

“The Albanese government supports the 3G switchover, but it needs to be done in a safer way,” said Rowland in a statement. “The government will consider potential regulatory intervention if it is necessary and in the public interest, subject to the required consultation and procedural processes.”

Telstra is currently planning to turn off 3G at the end of August, while Optus is set to do so at the start of September.

Australia’s third mobile network operator, Vodafone Australia, has already completed its 3G switch off, which it started in December last year.

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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’

Network operator nexfibre, which shares some of their parentage with UK broadband ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), has announced that they’ve added 20,000 additional homes in the Buckinghamshire (England) town of Milton Keynes to the coverage of their new 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network.

Until recently Virgin Media didn’t have much of any presence in Milton Keynes, which has been dominated by gigabit-capable rivals like Cityfibre and Openreach (not to mention some smaller deployments from Hyperoptic, OFNL and others). But you can now find Virgin and nexfibre’s new FTTP network running across much of the eastern edge of the town.

Nexfibre itself has already covered over 1 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network, and they’re currently in the process of investing another £1bn during 2024, which should enable them to cover an additional 1 million UK premises (on top of their existing footprint).

Just for some context. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners originally setup the new £4.5bn nexfibre joint venture in 2022 (here), which aims to deploy an open access fibre network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s network of 16m+ premises. The funding reflects £3.3bn of fully underwritten financing and up to £1.4bn in equity commitments.