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Mobile network operator EE (inc. BT) has notified UK customers in Nepal (South Asia) that, due to the devastating impact of yesterday’s catastrophic flash flood and mudslide on the Nepal-Tibet border, they’re promising to credit back charges for mobile calls, texts and data (mobile broadband) used in the country, as well as mobile and landline calls from the UK to Nepal. (more…)
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West Sussex County Council is leading the way in smart livestock monitoring. Through the public sector-led Growing Sussex programme, it is partnering with Boldyn Networks (Boldyn) and agritech specialist Pneumonitor, to connect Pneumonitor’s in-pen environmental monitoring device to Boldyn’s private 5G network. The deployment gives farmers near real-time insight into conditions inside livestock buildings, helping them identify and respond more quickly to environmental factors that may increase the risk of respiratory disease and animal stress.
Unlike sensors typically mounted on walls, Pneumonitor measures conditions within the pen, where the animals are. Connected through 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) technology, the device can share timely information from livestock buildings and support practical, scalable monitoring across farms.
The deployment comes as repeated heatwaves across parts of the UK and Europe place greater pressure on livestock and farm operations. By helping farmers understand how conditions are changing, the technology can support earlier action, animal health and welfare, productivity and long-term resilience.
Cllr Yvonne Gravely, Cabinet Member for Economy and Skills at West Sussex County Council, said: “Agriculture plays a vital role in West Sussex, but periods of extreme weather are creating new challenges for the sector. Through Growing Sussex, we’re helping growers and food producers use technology to better understand changing conditions, protect animal welfare and build resilience for the future. That’s good for local businesses, good for our rural economy and good for West Sussex.”
Gearoid Collins, Commercial Director, Real Estate, Enterprise & Wind Farms at Boldyn Networks, said: “As the connectivity partner for Growing Sussex, we’re committed to helping shape a new era for agriculture and deploy technologies that bring a welcome boost to the West Sussex economy. Connecting Pneumonitor through RedCap shows how private 5G can support practical agritech and provide the digital foundation for many more connected applications across the farming sector.”
Isaac Orr, Chief Executive Officer at Pneumonitor, said: “With heatwaves becoming more frequent, conditions inside livestock buildings can deteriorate faster than they can be spotted by eye. Pneumonitor measures conditions in the pen itself, where the animals are, rather than at the wall where sensors are usually mounted. This project showed when heat load was building and what could be done before yields were affected. The connectivity behind the deployment now allows us to bring this monitoring to far more sites than before. We thank Boldyn Networks and the Growing Sussex programme for their partnership.”
Bringing advanced wireless technology to the farm
RedCap is designed for IoT devices that do not require the full capabilities of standard 5G. It combines 5G connectivity with lower power consumption, reduced battery requirements and longer device life, helping lower maintenance needs and operating costs for farm-based deployments.
Growing Sussex was established by West Sussex County Council to co-develop and showcase practical uses of 5G, IoT and AI across food, drink and agricultural production. The programme brings together local government, specialist education providers and technology partners, with input from growers and livestock producers.
Boldyn Networks and West Sussex County Council announced plans for four private 5G networks in 2024. All four Growing Sussex partner sites were live by December 2025. The Pneumonitor integration adds livestock-building environmental monitoring to the programme’s wider connected-agriculture ecosystem.
How can the latest in connectivity technology reinvigorate British agriculture? Join the discussion at Connected Britain, the UK’s largest digital economy event
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Original article Total Telecom:Read More
Telecom automation is moving beyond predefined tasks towards networks that can increasingly analyse conditions, make decisions and act autonomously. Self-configuration for provisioning, closed-loop optimisation, and automated fault recovery promise greater operational efficiency and reliability, while enabling services to be provisioned and adapted with less manual intervention.
The transition is already underway. According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and TM Forum: Navigating autonomous networks, 73% of network executives surveyed said their organisations had developed phased roadmaps towards autonomous operations. Yet only 6% of CSPs reported operating highly autonomous Level 4 network instances. Within three years, 22% expect to reach that level.
What must change to bridge that gap? It starts with data. As a data transformation company, DFG CONSULTING focuses on the quality and trustworthiness of the physical network data that automation depends on.
When the network and its data diverge
Telecom networks have evolved continuously over decades, but the data describing them has not always kept pace. Network extensions, technology changes, mergers and system migrations have left many operators with information distributed across multiple systems and formats.
Critical network information may still reside in CAD or Visio drawings, PDFs, raster images and spreadsheets alongside central inventory systems. While valuable to engineers, this unstructured information cannot readily support automation.
The challenge goes deeper than format. Field changes are not always accurately reflected in the system of record, creating discrepancies between as-planned and as-built networks.
Missing or incorrect connectivity creates further uncertainty. Engineers and field teams may consequently maintain local “shadow documentation” to capture information that is missing, outdated or difficult to retrieve from the system of record.
The problem is therefore often not the absence of data, but whether operators can trust that it accurately represents the physical network and whether it is in the right form for growing network automation and autonomy.
The consequences of inaccurate data
Experienced engineers might still recognise when a network record does not reflect reality and question it before acting. Automated operations do not necessarily have that safeguard because they cannot recognise inaccurate data.
Physical assets do not have intelligence, telemetry, or at least some form of active communication. They cannot report their state. They cannot self-discover. They cannot tell an inventory system where they are, how they’re connected, or whether they were built to design. Automated decisions solely rely on a trustworthy, precise, end-to-end digital representation of all available physical assets.
Incorrect data can lead to an incorrect path calculation, affecting service provisioning or instructions for field teams. Inaccurate connectivity can result in flawed impact analysis and the wrong customers or services being identified during an outage.
Intelligent data migration
Recognising the need for trustworthy data is the easy part — the challenge is quality, scale, efficiency and continuity. Operators may hold hundreds of thousands of legacy files accumulated over decades, while new documentation keeps arriving, often incomplete, inconsistent or conflicting, and daily operations cannot pause while this data is transformed.
The question becomes: how can operators convert, validate, and reconcile network data at scale while updating operational data on the fly?
Physical network documentation is naturally fragmented across distinct views — spatial maps, schematics and splice diagrams — each describing the same elements at a different level of detail. Manually redrawing legacy files into operational support systems is common, but a more effective approach is to use a specialised tool Interactively Assisted Converter™ that extracts data from legacy drawings and structures it in a machine-readable format, ready for direct ingestion into the system of record.
This tool can cross-reference and merge disparate views into a single dataset, with AI adapting to the multiple drawing standards different data providers use. Data conversion is fundamentally a cleaning process: automation extracts, structures, and resolves quality issues for most of the data, while human oversight handles conflicting edge cases — far more reliable than manual redrawing, which is resource-intensive and prone to replicating existing mistakes into the central system of record.
Keeping humans in control
As autonomous systems make decisions at a scale and speed humans cannot replicate, engineers may struggle to understand and independently validate them. Human-readable network connectivity visualisation therefore becomes more important, not less: data transformation gives us machine-operational data, but at the cost of human readability.
The answer isn’t another manually maintained layer of “shadow” documentation. Instead, iNTERACTIVE SCHEMATICS™ can automatically generate high-level and low-level network diagrams directly from the same inventory data used for automation — providing a real-time visual representation from the single source of truth.
Network connectivity visualisation is now evolving from documentation into a control and validation layer between automated systems and engineers, turning trusted digital data into an interactive operational view to support design, planning, troubleshooting, maintenance, and service provisioning.
Trust before autonomy
Autonomous networks are not only about making machines more intelligent. They also require a trustworthy representation of the physical network and the human visibility needed to understand and validate manual and automated decisions.
As network operators move towards higher levels of autonomy, the strategic question is:
Do we have an effective, trustworthy and scalable way to convert, validate, reconcile and visualise the physical network data on which network operations depend?
DFG CONSULTING can help you answer that question.
We can assess a representative sample of your own data to identify quality gaps, transformation opportunities and potential process improvements — and determine what it takes to make your network data trusted and automation-ready.
Contact mi************@****on.si to arrange an initial assessment or meet us at Connected Britain 2026 on 9–10 September.
Miha Ušeničnik has spent more than two decades working across telecommunications, technology development and operational transformation.
He has held senior technical and management positions in telecom and technology companies, including responsibility for broadband network development and WiMAX systems, and contributed to national broadband policy as principal author of Slovenia’s Broadband Strategy.
At DFG CONSULTING, his focus is on helping network operators transform complex network data into trusted, structured information that can support more efficient operations, automation and AI.
The post Garbage in, bad decisions out: The data problem behind autonomous networks appeared first on Total Telecom.
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Carlisle-based alternative broadband provider Grain, which has so far built their point-to-point full fibre (FTTP) network to cover 300,000 UK premises and connect 56,000 customers, have confirmed that their new network in the Lincolnshire (England) town of Scunthorpe has started to go live for customers. (more…)
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A new report has revealed that two UK broadband ISPs, Exascale and Squirrel Internet, have recently decided to stop selling access to Gigaclear’s alternative full fibre network. The move occurred due to what appears to be a conflict of interest over how the altnet treats their wholesale partners when compared with their own direct retail customers. (more…)
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One of the biggest problems with using direct optical (laser) links in free space (i.e. out in the open air) between sites is that atmospheric distortion (turbulence) over distance can create interference, which causes the data speeds to slow and stability to weaken. But a solution may have been found by a joint team at Wits University (South Africa) and the University of Bordeaux (France). (more…)
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The AllPoints Fibre Network (APFN), which is a wholesale platform that aggregates connectivity from several different UK networks, has today complemented their existing full fibre (FTTP) and Ethernet services by introducing hybrid fibre SoGEA broadband products for their ISP partners – bringing a further 9.3 million premises within reach of their platform. (more…)
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A team of researchers from the Queen Mary University of London have discovered a new way to make wireless communication devices, such as antennas, more adaptable by making tiny atomic changes to the structure of a material that can “dramatically improve its ability to respond to electrical signals“. The work could have applications in everything from home Wi-Fi to satellites and mobile broadband networks etc. (more…)
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Vodafone Business, the enterprise arm of VodafoneThree, has announced a partnership with Tech Mahindra, a leading global provider of technology consulting and digital solutions to enterprises across industries, reinforcing its commitment to helping organisations across the UK accelerate digital transformation and realise the benefits of emerging technologies.
Building on VodafoneThree’s £11bn investment to create the UK’s best network for business – and provide organisations with the secure, resilient and scalable digital foundations they need to modernise and grow – the agreement establishes a structured model for executive engagement, co-innovation and go-to-market collaboration. It will enable both organisations to identify and develop opportunities where their complementary capabilities can help customers simplify operations, modernise technology environments and deliver measurable business outcomes.
By combining Vodafone Business’ enterprise and digital infrastructure capabilities with Tech Mahindra’s expertise in AI-led technology transformation, systems integration, digital engineering and managed services, the two organisations will develop industry-led propositions for UK customers. The collaboration will leverage AI, automation, private 5G, IoT, cloud and data to modernise operations, strengthen resilience, accelerate digital adoption and unlock new business models.
Tech Mahindra has a strong UK presence, combining local market expertise with global capabilities in AI, digital engineering, cloud and data. Guided by its “AI Delivered Right” strategy, Tech Mahindra helps organisations move AI from experimentation to enterprise-scale adoption and measurable outcomes. Through this partnership with Vodafone Business, both organisations will combine their strengths to help UK businesses modernise operations, strengthen resilience and accelerate AI-led growth.
The agreement supports Vodafone Business’ broader strategy to build a strong ecosystem of specialist partners, giving customers access to the expertise and capabilities they need at each stage of their digital transformation. By bringing together enterprise services, digital infrastructure and technology expertise, Vodafone Business is helping organisations adapt to changing market demands, improve operational performance and drive sustainable growth.
Nick Gliddon, Business Director, VodafoneThree, commented: “This partnership with Tech Mahindra brings together the capabilities organisations need to move faster in a complex digital landscape. By combining Vodafone Business’ connectivity, technology and security expertise with Tech Mahindra’s specialist transformation capabilities, we’re strengthening our partner ecosystem and giving customers access to integrated solutions across cloud, AI, cyber security and digital transformation – helping them cut through complexity, build resilience and become more agile, competitive and future-ready.”
Harshul Asnani, President and Head of Europe Business, Tech Mahindra, said: “Tech Mahindra has a deep heritage in telecommunications and extensive experience helping enterprises modernise complex technology and operating environments. This framework with Vodafone Business brings together our complementary strengths to help UK organisations accelerate AI-led transformation. By combining AI, automation, digital engineering and industry expertise, we will help enterprises modernise networks and operations, build resilient digital ecosystems and unlock measurable business outcomes at scale.”
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