News

Telecoms companies and industry associations have submitted recommendations for how the FCC should allocate spectrum, despite losing their auction authority.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is seeking ways to circumvent its lack of spectrum auction authority.

Some of the nation’s largest telecom companies have offered recommendations, but there is plenty of disagreement on how the FCC should utilize loopholes to award spectrum.

In March 2023, Congress declined to renew the FCC’s authority to conduct spectrum auctions. The Commission is now unable to issue new spectrum licenses and dispute over usage of the lower 3GHz band of spectrum is ongoing.

After over a year, the FCC is still unable to conduct spectrum auctions. So far, T-Mobile is the only large company that has publicly raised a complaint, but the FCC is keen to explore solutions beyond Congress.

T-Mobile has previously taken spectrum issues directly to Congress. After the FCC lost auction authority, T-Mobile was unable to access the licenses it was awarded during Auction 108, which occurred while the FCC still had auction authority. Ultimately, legislation from Congress instructed the FCC to release auction winnings, but did not restore broader authority.

A Public Notice, released by the FCC in March, sought comments on “how the Commission should fulfill its responsibility to make spectrum resources available for use in the public interest in light of the ongoing lapse of the Commission’s auction authority”.

The FCC mentioned several bands of spectrum it might make available for use in the public interest. These bands, called “Inventory Spectrum” by the agency, include 600MHz, 700MHz, 800MHz, AWS-3, PCS, BRS and MVDDS.

The Commission asked for comments on several questions, including whether it could utilize its ‘Special Temporary Authority’ (STA) to release spectrum, approve spectrum-sharing or lease spectrum licenses. Final comments are to be submitted by 22nd April.

Some of the country’s largest wireless operators and industry bodies have urged the FCC to use its STA process to make spectrum available.

The CTIA, the major lobbying association for large US wireless operators submitted comments stating that where needed, “STA licenses may be a rational vehicle for making spectrum available from the Inventory Spectrum pending reauthorization of the agency’s auction authority.”

Verizon agreed, noting that any proposed options are “inferior to assigning Inventory Spectrum by auction” but that “the Commission could rely on its special temporary authority to grant access to Inventory Spectrum licenses on a temporary basis”.

In its comments to the FCC last week, T-Mobile concurred, having first suggested the use of STA last year. T-Mobile noted that there are well-established processes for issuing STAs, meaning that spectrum can be available quickly.

While the large wireless operators argued that the FCC should not rely on spectrum-sharing, the NCTA encouraged the agency to use “coexistence-based frameworks” to license spectrum. The NCTA represents, among others, the country’s large cable companies, such as Comcast and Charter Communications.

EchoStar, the parent company of Dish Network, prompted the FCC to offer “right of first refusal” for Inventory Spectrum to “non-incumbent carriers (more specifically, every carrier other than AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon)”.

As the FCC seeks the return of its auction authority, these interim measures aim to allow consumers and enterprises to reap the benefits of additional spectrum. Given the political deadlock in Washington, there is no clear indication when the FCC will be able to auction spectrum again.

New data from Ookla‘s popular broadband connection testing service, Speedtest.net, has revealed how well Samsung’s Galaxy S24, S23 and S22 family perform for 5G based UK mobile broadband speeds vs Apple’s latest iPhone 15 family. Overall, the S24 comes out as the fastest, but experiences may vary.

Naturally, there can be caveats with internet speed testing services like this, since we don’t know anything about the locations of different users, what mobile spectrum bands they were being used, whether the devices were performing any other background internet tasks while the test was being performed or any limitations of the remote servers etc. Mobile operator performance may also differ between locations by how much capacity they have available etc.

Nevertheless, Ookla’s latest data attempts to analyse how the Samsung Galaxy S24 family (S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra) measures up against its predecessors, in terms of 5G speed and latency, during its first several weeks on the market. The benchmarking firm also pits those against Apple’s iPhone 15 family (15, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max) to see how the different chipsets perform.

In the UK, Samsung’s S24 models were found to be the “fastest in the market“, returning a median (average) 5G download speed of 156.71Mbps – offering a speed gain of nearly 40Mbps compared to the Galaxy S22 family. Galaxy S24 models also posted faster speeds than both the Galaxy S23 and iPhone 15 families. But as we say, take all of this with a pinch of salt, although it’s not unusual to find that the most modern devices tend to also be the fastest.

News

The concerns follow an initial report on AI Foundation Models published in September last year 

The UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has expressed concerns over the growing power of big tech companies in the AI Foundation Models (FMs) market.  

Speaking at a conference in Washington DC last week, the CMA’s CEO Sarah Cardell explained that the concentration of power amongst Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia gives them “the ability and incentives to shape these markets in their own interests”.  

These companies not only dominate in the development of foundation models, but also in their deployment to consumers, through apps for example. 

Highlighting the swift evolution of this sector, Cardell warned of three key risks that pose significant challenges to fair and open competition: 

Companies controlling critical inputs for developing FMs may restrict access to shield themselves from competition
Powerful incumbents could exploit their positions in consumer or business facing markets to distort choice in FM services and restrict competition in deployment
Partnerships involving key players could exacerbate existing positions of market power through the value chain

The speech’s accompanying update paper highlights a growing “interconnected web” of over 90 partnerships and strategic investments between the aforementioned six companies. These partnerships reinforce existing concentrations of market power, and stifle competition and innovation of rivals in the process. Therefore, the CMA is “keeping very close watch on current and emerging partnerships,” said Cardell.  

Although acknowledging that these companies have an important role in the development of the AI market, through their resources and expertise, the paper notes the importance of avoiding an “over-dependence” on them. 

Set to be published this week, the CMA will release a detailed technical report on FMs, accompanied by finalised principles to guide regulatory action. 

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

Also in the news:
South Korea to invest $7 billion in AI semiconductors
Swisscom expands 5G partnership with Ericsson
Daisy Group set to acquire 4Com for £215m

News 

The Spanish Ministry of Defence has awarded Telefonica the majority of a tender to provide them with a secure private telecommunications network services 

According to Spanish news source Expansión, the company has won three out of four lots of the I3D (Comprehensive Information Infrastructure for Defence) contract for a total of €80.3 million.  

The I3D is the new communications and information network for senior government officials and the Armed Forces, hence requiring the highest level of network security. The contract includes the deployment of a dark fibre network and the accompanying physical infrastructure.  

Unsurprisingly, more specific details relating to the infrastructure being deployed in this sensitive project were not revealed. 

The last remaining I3D contract for €3.3 million was won by Balalink, a subsea cable connecting mainland Spain to the Balearic Islands, from Valencia to Palma. 

As the largest telecoms operator in Spain, Telefonica is already deeply intwined with the nation’s Ministry of Defense, having won five related government contracts, worth €170 million, in the last year alone. 

However, the company’s privileged position as a trusted government partner has been under scrutiny in recent months. In September last year, Saudi Arabia’s STC Group built a 9.9% stake in the business, prompting the government to take a similar stake in Telefonica last month to mitigate STC’s influence.  

The Spanish government acquired a 3% stake in the company via state holding company SEPI, saying they would increase the stake slowly in the next few months to 10%, a move valued at around €2 billion.  

The move represents a partial renationalisation of the Telefónica, which has been a fully private company since 1997.  

The government explained that the state investment is “in line with other large European countries, such as France and Germany, which have and are increasing their shareholdings in big and strategic telecommunications operators”.  

The acquisition remains pending regulatory approval. 

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

Also in the news:
South Korea to invest $7 billion in AI semiconductors
Swisscom expands 5G partnership with Ericsson
Daisy Group set to acquire 4Com for £215m 

Equitix-backed network operator Freedom Fibre, which has already deployed their full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP network to cover 300,000 UK premises and aspires to cover 2 million premises, has today announced that they’ve secured their fifth ISO certification with ISO9001 for quality management standards.

For those who many not know, ISO certifications are somewhat of a seal of approval from a third-party body, which represents a series of global standards developed and published by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). The idea is that by securing these companies can show that they’re safe, reliable and of good quality for particular tasks, features, management and / or services etc.

Until today, Freedom Fibre had already secured ISO certifications for occupational health and safety (ISO45001), environmental management (ISO14001), information security management (ISO27001) and business continuity management (ISO22301). The addition of quality management (ISO9001) gives them five ISO standards, which is more than the vast majority of alternative broadband networks in the UK have been able to attain.

The provider has been working to secure most of the above over the past two years or more as part of their ‘Freedom to Grow‘ project, which the provider believes helps to highlight their “growth, commitment to excellence, and goal to be one of the UK’s key players in the Altnet market.”

Rick Byers, FF’s Chief Risk Officer, said:

“I am pleased to announce the achievement of our ISO9001 certification after many months of hard work in enhancing our business processes. Our goal was always to focus on organising and optimising our processes in line with our business goals, and (if we did that correctly) the ISO9001 certification would be a positive by-product, so it is great to see that our work has met this standard.

Not only does ISO9001 show that we maintain quality at the root of our work, but it also gives us the ecosystem to ensure we maintain this level of quality in the future. This has a massive positive impact on our customers, our investors and the Freedom Fibre team.”

The Quality Management Systems ISO 9001 standard is generally designed to help company’s improve customer satisfaction levels, internal efficiency and process consistency.

News

According to the latest data from IDC, Samsung has once again overtaken Apple as the largest smartphone manufacturer in the market, with China’s smartphone players also noting strong growth

The smartphone market itself took a noticeable decline during the coronavirus pandemic, but is now climbing steadily once again, increasing 7.8% to 289.4 million units in Q1 2024.

Of these new sales, Samsung had a 20.8% market share, while Apple accounted for 17.3% and China’s Xiaomi had 14.1%.

Apple and Samsung have been passing the smartphone crown back and forth over the past year, with Apple having held the top spot as recently as December last year.

According to IDC, this back-and-forth represents a changing market, with a resurgence of Chinese brands like Huawei and Xiaomi.

The results also saw Chinese smartphone manufacturer Transsion enter the top five for the first time, squeezing out Vivo. While relatively unknown in the West, Transsion is a rapidly growing smartphone brand in emerging markets, particularly Africa where it sold more phones than both Samsung and Xiaomi.

“The smartphone market is emerging from the turbulence of the last two years both stronger and changed,” said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Tracker team.

“Xiaomi is coming back strong from the large declines experienced over the past two years and Transsion is becoming a stable presence in the Top 5 with aggressive growth in international markets,” she said.

“In contrast, while the top two players both saw negative growth in the first quarter, it seems Samsung is in a stronger position overall than they were in recent quarters.”

Q1 2024 marks the third consecutive quarter of shipment growth for the worldwide smartphone market, a strong indicator that a recovery is well underway. https://t.co/KXkfbp65RZ pic.twitter.com/DnSQBB9cgl

— IDC (@IDC) April 15, 2024

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

Also in the news:
South Korea to invest $7 billion in AI semiconductors
Swisscom expands 5G partnership with Ericsson
Daisy Group set to acquire 4Com for £215m

The UK telecoms, internet and media regulator, Ofcom, has recently increased the payment amounts issued to consumers under their automatic compensation system, which requires some broadband ISPs to compensate customers (cash or bill credits) for internet connectivity mishaps and installation delays.

The voluntary system, which first launched all the way back in April 2019 (full summary), was until last month designed to compensate consumers by £9.33 per day for delayed repairs following a loss of broadband (assuming it isn’t fixed within 2 working days). Missed appointments could also attract compensation of £29.15 and a delay to the start of a new service would be £5.83 per day.

However, the compensation amounts are designed to increase in April every year (in line with inflation), which is based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as of 31st October in the previous year. This is perhaps a little bit awkward now since, on the flip side, Ofcom are separately preparing to ban mid-contract price hikes for consumers that are linked to inflation or % based changes (here).

In any case, the change means that member ISPs will now need to pay out £9.76 per day for delayed repairs, £30.49 for missed appointments and £6.10 per day for a delay to the start of a new service. One catch with this is that higher payments can indirectly contribute to general bill hikes and often discourage other ISPs from joining – especially smaller providers, due to the high cost and technical requirements (new systems needed .) of supporting the scheme. We should point that some of those self-excluded providers already have their own approaches to compensation.

Take note that this change was actually introduced right at the end of last month, but we’re playing catch-up today after overlooking it during the Easter Holiday period.

Industry sources have indicated to ISPreview that two prominent alternative network operators, Netomnia (YouFibre) and Brsk, both of which have deployed a significant amount of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband infrastructure to cover UK homes and businesses, could be set to merge their networks in the near future.

Netomnia is currently the largest of the two operators, having already covered 850,000 premises and raising £795.5m of investment in the space of just three years (primarily via Advencap, DigitalBridge and Soho Square). The operator, which sells its packages to consumers via sibling ISP YouFibre (they have 80,000 customers), also holds a tentative ambition to reach up to 2 million premises by the end of 2025 (1.5m is already planned).

By comparison, Brsk – fuelled by an investment of at least £259m (mostly via Advencap and the Ares Management Corp) – has so far covered 450,000 homes (441,000 Ready for Service) in England and sells packages to consumers under the same brand (they have 28,000 customers). But they also aim to pass 1 million homes by 2026.

According to industry sources, Brsk and Netomnia are currently alleged to be engaged in discussions that could result in the pair agreeing to merge their networks “in the next 4-6 weeks.” Such a deal would not be all that surprising, particularly given that both operators are partly being backed by the same investor, Advencap.

In addition, both operators have managed to avoid overbuilding each other, and appear to share a similarly capital-efficient approach to infrastructure build, which harnesses as much of Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles (PIA) to run new fibre as possible (Netomnia spends an average of £250 per premises passed). This may be a key point, much as Netomnia recently told ISPreview in our interview (here).

Jeremy Chelot, CEO of Netomnia and YouFibre, said:

“Where altnets differ significantly is the capital they spend to get premises RFS and to acquire customers. By the end of February 2024, Netomnia and YouFibre have only consumed £170m of debt. That works out to £200 of debt for each premises RFS – the larger altnets in the UK have consumed up to five times more debt than us for each premises they make RFS. And it’s the same story with equity.

Because of our key difference (capital efficiency), it makes consolidation in the UK very hard. We are so capital efficient that almost every deal will cost us more than organic growth and we have an addressable market in front of us of several millions. Therefore, while we would love to be a consolidator, it makes it difficult. We have not built the business to be consolidated. We focus on delivering for our customers and becoming the third network in the United Kingdom and that’s what drives me!”

At this point, any agreement between the two would naturally create a much larger player in the AltNet space (c.1.5 million premises passed and plans for c.3 million) and one that could much more readily challenge the leading players in this space, such as CityFibre, CommunityFibre and Hyperoptic. But equally, it could also turn them into a bigger target for CityFibre’s own M&A ambitions, further down the road.

Finally, both operators adopt consumer pricing that is roughly within the same ballpark, although YouFibre’s packages do go a lot faster (up to 7-8Gbps). But suffice to say that this would make it easier to align their respective customer offerings, hopefully without upsetting the base too much.

We queried all of this with Netomnia and Brsk today, although much as you’d expect, both returned a “no comment” response (par for the course when asking about M&A or anything commercially sensitive). Time will tell.

Some of Sky Mobile’s customers are continuing to experience connectivity (calls and data) problems today after the operator suffered a large disruption to 3G, 4G and 5G services yesterday afternoon, which Sky initially claimed to have fixed. The remaining issue seems to only be impacting data (mobile broadband) connectivity and not calling.

The problems first began at around 4:30pm yesterday, when customers reported a mix of problems with calls failing to connect and unresponsive data connectivity. Sky then reported at 9:38pm that the “problem has now been resolved,” although a smaller number of customers have continued to report that this wasn’t completely true, as their data links still weren’t functional.

A spokesperson for Sky has this afternoon confirmed that they’re continuing to experience problems: “We’re extremely sorry that some customers are still experiencing issues with their Sky Mobile data services. We had implemented a fix yesterday evening which restored services for the majority of impacted customers. Our teams are working hard to resolve this problem for any remaining customers still experiencing issues, as quickly as possible.”

The Sky Mobile service is based off a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement with O2 (VMO2), although we note that none of O2’s other MVNO partners appeared to be experiencing any big issues (i.e. this seems Sky specific). But we did note that O2’s own complaint volumes for the same period were a little bit above normal, albeit not to the same scale as Sky Mobile.

Welsh internet provider Ogi, which is building a multi-Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network for homes and businesses across South Wales, has today published an interesting visualisation of their optical backhaul network that shows all the key fibre links and distances between their key locations (Points of Presence).

The network operator has so far covered a total of 100,000 premises with their new full fibre network – most of them residential – in Wales up to the end of 2023 (up from 60k on 30th June 2023) and they’re also now home to a total of over 15,000 customers (4th March 2024), which is up from 10,000 on 4th Jan 2024 and 6,000 on 30th June 2023.

The new visualisation of Ogi’s optical Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network doesn’t tell us anything particularly new or surprising, it’s just quite a fun and interesting way of showing everybody how much work has been done to build the network and the way they’ve organised it, albeit only visualised to a very high / simplistic level.

Justin Leese, Ogi’s CTO, said:

“Here at Ogi we talk a lot about the towns where we’re building fibre across South Wales, and rightly so. However, we’ve not said much about the glue that connects those towns together and provides onward connectivity to the internet exchanges at London Internet Exchange (LINX), LINX Wales and LINX Manchester.

Over the past 2.5 years we’ve created a pan-South Wales optical backhaul network that gives us high capacity between those towns right now and massive scalability for the future. It also provides connectivity to our IT platforms, including our VoIP/SIP telephony systems, that are based in Vantage Data Centers. All of this achieved in a part of the UK that is not blessed with lots of pre-existing infrastructure.

We’ve worked with our own Network Build team to create many of these long-distance fibre routes using PIA. This has included significant engineering challenges, such as getting multi-ducts and fibre across the Cleddau Bridge in Pembrokeshire. Where it’s not been cost-effective or timely to build our own routes, we’ve worked with a variety of wholesale partners to take IRU’s or rent fibres to form this backbone.

Congratulations to my Director of Engineering and Network Ops, Doug Williams and his Network Engineering team (David Jones, Sophie Bartlett, Philip Jewell and Liam Mainwaring) who have diligently built the Points of Presence, commissioned the optical circuits and created this in a surprisingly short timeframe. I am super proud of you all.”