Network operator CityFibre, which has made no secret of its desire to boost the growth of their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network through consolidation (example), will today reportedly announce the £80m acquisition of alternative network provider Lit Fibre. At present CityFibre’s wider ambition remains to cover up to 8 million UK premises […]

Telecoms provider Vodafone UK will today launch “The Great British Telecoms Switch” campaign, which encourages those on Openreach’s wider fixed broadband and phone network – with different ISPs – to save money by switching to their service. New customers who take their top 900Mbps FTTP plan will also get up to £100 to cover any […]

Broadband and mobile provider VMO2 (Virgin Media and O2) has today announced an expansion of their O2 Recycle scheme, which enables UK people to trade-in unwanted devices for cash, to include popular video gaming consoles from Sony (PlayStation), Microsoft (Xbox), Meta (Oculus) and Nintendo. The initiative, which is now also accepting MacBooks, alongside smartphones, tablets, […]

Stockholm and Madrid, 12 March, 2024 – Arelion and Telxius are collaborating to provide fully diverse, multi-terabit connectivity into Telxius’ landing stations in Boca Raton and Jacksonville, Florida. This fiber network expansion establishes Arelion Points-of-Presence (PoPs) at each Telxius landing station. For Telxius, it empowers customers with resilient Tier-1 optical transport and high-speed access to Arelion’s North American network. Together, Arelion and Telxius are making a significant investment in the Florida Peninsula to connect Latin American customers to North America through submarine and terrestrial systems.

The collaboration benefits both Arelion and Telxius’ customers in North America and Latin America with enhanced access to the companies’ global Internet backbones. Customers also benefit from Telxius’ portfolio of leading submarine and terrestrial backhauls, and Arelion’s resilient terrestrial connectivity services, including high-capacity wavelengths for service providers, content providers and enterprises.

Arelion’s PoPs enable resilient 400G Wavelengths services over open line systems supporting the latest coherent technology, seamlessly connecting Internet carriers and content providers to Arelion’s network in the United States. This network expansion complements Arelion’s existing presence at Telxius’ Virginia Beach landing station and further cements Arelion as a key terrestrial connectivity provider in North America. Telxius’ Virginia Beach landing station is the landing point for three next-generation subsea systems connecting to Latin America and Europe: Brusa, Marea and Dunant. Telxius’ Boca Raton landing station is the terminal point for Telxius’ South America-1 (SAm-1) and upcoming Tikal submarine cable system, while Telxius’ Jacksonville landing station connects to the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS). Both landing stations provide diverse, high-capacity connectivity to the United States from Panama, South America and the Caribbean.

“Arelion’s new PoPs at Telxius’ landing stations along the Florida Peninsula will provide Latin American markets with high-capacity gateway access to the North American connectivity ecosystem,” said Edison De Leon, Regional Director Latam & Caribbean at Arelion. “Through this investment in the Florida Peninsula, Arelion continues our established partnership with Telxius to serve the technological needs of Internet carriers and content providers through complete, collaborative connectivity solutions.”

Florida’s technology industry recently ranked fourth in the United States for tech growth, adding 2,715 tech businesses last year and outpacing established hubs, including California and Texas. Arelion and Telxius’ partnership establishes key interconnection points for Latin American companies requiring access to major cloud regions, content applications and network infrastructure supporting Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) applications in North America.

“We at Telxius are committed to expanding our high-capacity terrestrial backhauls in combination with our next-generation subsea cable networks to connect the world’s digital hubs and better serve our customers across the Americas”, said Carlos Casado, VP of Sales, Telxius, Northern Region. “Our continued collaboration will provide ultra-high capacity, low latency and robust access to Latin America and transatlantic markets for Arelion and its customers. For Telxius, it secures 400G transmission services in our Boca Raton and Jacksonville landing stations, enabling resilient Tier-1 optical transport and high-speed access to Arelion’s North American network for customers.”

About Arelion

Arelion solves global connectivity challenges for multinational enterprises whose businesses rely on digital infrastructure. On top of the world’s #1 ranked IP backbone and a unique ecosystem of cloud and network service providers, we provide an award-winning customer experience to customers in more than 125 countries worldwide. Our global Internet services connect more than 700 cloud, security and content providers with low latency. For further resilience, our private Cloud Connect service connects directly to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle cloud across North America, Europe and Asia. Discover more at Arelion.com, and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Telxius

As the world’s needs for uninterrupted global interconnectivity continue to rise, we are preparing the road ahead. Telxius is a leading global connectivity provider that combines subsea and terrestrial networks with data centers worldwide. Its extensive ecosystem includes eight next-generation fiber optic submarine cables and terrestrial backhauls together spanning 100,000+ km, almost 100 PoPs in 17 countries, plus 25 landing stations and data centers. Telxius provides a wide range of capacity, colocation and security services, as well as direct internet connectivity through its Tier-1 IP network. With ultra-high capacity, low latency and resilient networking, Telxius seamlessly connects customers across the Americas, Europe and beyond. For more information about Telxius visit www.telxius.com.

Contacts:

Arelion
Martin Sjögren, Senior Manager PR and Analyst Relations
+46 (0)707 770 522

martin.sjogren@arelion.com 

Media Contact

Jeannette Bitz, Engage PR

+1 510 295 4972

jbitz@engagepr.com

Telxius

comunicacion@telxius.com

WALTHAM, MA — March 12, 2024 — Netcracker Technology announced today that leading Croatian telecommunications provider Hrvatski Telekom will continue its long-term partnership by implementing Netcracker Revenue Management – part of Netcracker Digital BSS – to modernize its IT infrastructure and merge its mobile and fixed-line systems.

Hrvatski Telekom will upgrade to the latest version of Netcracker’s digital-first and cloud-native revenue management platform, which will deliver a number of key business benefits, including automation of the operator’s postpaid charging processes and the ability to integrate with internal and external revenue management functions such as accounts receivable, collections, revenue assurance, payment management and more for its lines of business. Netcracker will also continue to provide Support & Maintenance services, which include analytics-based tools that provide uninterrupted business continuity and the highest level of service quality.

“We are delighted to continue working with our strategic partner Netcracker for billing and revenue management due to our successful working relationship over the years,” said Suzana Vodicka Varga, Director of IT Enterprise Applications Department at Hrvatski Telekom. “The upgrade and support from Netcracker will allow us to automate our entire postpaid charging process and give us the flexibility to merge our fixed and mobile systems to provide the best possible customer experience.”

“Working with Hrvatski Telekom as a trusted, long-term partner is truly rewarding for us,” said Benedetto Spaziani, GM at Netcracker. “Continuing on this journey with our next-generation revenue management platform is very exciting, and I can’t wait to see the ongoing success we can accomplish going forward.”

About Netcracker Technology

Rapid digitization is disrupting the status quo of today’s communications markets. Constantly evolving customer needs and behaviors require service providers to adapt quickly and diversify their businesses to deliver the outcomes that their customers expect. Building digital ecosystems, anticipating customer requirements and delivering a digital-first experience are essential for service providers to accelerate innovation, expand into new markets and become the disruptors in the 5G era.

Netcracker Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, has the expertise, culture and resources to help service providers around the world transform their businesses to thrive in a digital economy. Our innovative solutions – including our flagship cloud-native Netcracker Digital Platform – value-driven services and unbroken delivery track record of three decades help service providers to achieve their digital transformation goals, drive the telco to techco evolution within their organizations and realize business growth and profitability. For more information, visit www.netcracker.com.

Media Contact

Anita Karvé
Netcracker Technology
MediaGroup@Netcracker.com   

About Hrvatski Telekom

Hrvatski Telekom (HT) is one of the largest and strongest companies in Croatia. HT is the leading company on the market and provides a full range of telecommunications services – fixed and mobile telephony services, data transmission, TV services, internet and international communications. As the leading digital infrastructure investor in the country HT continuously invests in the country’s future economic and social development.  For more information, visit: www.t.ht.hr

UK businesses lost over 50 million hours and £3.7 billion due to internet failures in 2023, according to a new report from Beaming, a specialist business ISP. Reliance on connectivity for trading and operational activities has increased among businesses in the last five years, and the cost of missed sales, lost productivity and other disruptions due to downtime has risen by 400%.

Beaming’s report – The Cost of Downtime: The Impact of Outages on UK Businesses in 2023 – shares its analysis of a Censuswide survey of businesses using connectivity from various internet service providers, and advice to help companies reduce downtime levels and costs. The report reveals that:

Cumulatively, UK businesses experienced 8.8 million internet failures and 50.5 million hours of disruptive downtime in 2023, where the ability to trade or access vital services was impaired.
The amount of time businesses lost to connectivity failures in 2023 was a fifth lower than in 2018 when previous Beaming research found that firms lost 60 million hours to downtime. However, the cost of that downtime has increased fivefold: from £742 million in 2018 to £3.7 billion in 2023. 
Heightened dependence on connectivity for communication, e-commerce and access to cloud applications means 15% of UK businesses, some 850,000 nationwide, would now start losing money the moment their connectivity fails. This is 81,000 more firms than five years ago. 
During 8-hour internet outages – a standard working day – 39% of businesses now would lose money. This compares to 34% at the end of 2018 and represents an increase of 240,000 companies nationwide.
The median time for financial losses to kick in from internet failures is 6 hours for businesses with employees today. This applies to employers of all sizes, from micro-companies with 2 to 10 employees to big companies with more than 250 staff members. 
SMEs bore the brunt of internet disruptions in 2023, enduring an average of 3 to 4 failures and 19 hours of downtime each. Those working a standard 8-hour day and 5-day week lose more than two working days a year to downtime, around 1% of their productive time.
The hospitality, IT, and manufacturing sectors experienced the highest levels of internet downtime and the biggest financial impact. On average, hospitality businesses lost 27 hours to downtime in 2023, while companies in the IT industry lost an estimated £555 million to connectivity failures.

Sonia Blizzard, Managing Director of Beaming, said: “The adoption of digital technologies has been a lifeline for business survival and a driver for increased prosperity in recent years, but this has come with a heightened dependence on connectivity. Companies are demanding more of their connectivity than ever before, and those relying on e-commerce, automation and public cloud services then incur the highest costs due to internet downtime.”

“Greater use of faster, stronger, more resilient forms of connectivity has helped reduce downtime, whilst downtime has become much more costly. Good planning, higher capacity services and expert support are vital now to reduce the risk of internet failure and the associated financial fallout.” 

Interview

At Connected America 2024, we spoke with Yigal Elbaz, SVP and Network CTO at AT&T (pictured, left) about the future of Open RAN and what it means for the operator

At the end of last year, AT&T announced an enormous $14 billion Open RAN deal with Ericsson, a deal Elbaz describes as “one of the most courageous and important collaborations that I can remember in our industry”.

The deal marks the largest commitment to Open RAN architecture by any brownfield operator to date, highlighting the technology’s growing maturity and technical progress.

“I’m very encouraged by the state of Open RAN in our industry,” said Elbaz, noting a steady increase in momentum with Tier 1 operators. “We’re getting to the point where we can get parity in terms of what we can get out of a CPU-based platform, in terms of energy and capacity. We’re seeing the ecosystem building more chipsets that can be used in radios, as well as more radio vendors willing to participate and build products.”

He explained that AT&T’s Open RAN strategy focusses on four key pillars:

Open hardware, with Elbaz noting that AT&T is aiming for “70% of our traffic to flow through open hardware by 2026”;
Migration to cloud RAN, a process that is already underway, with the first activation of cloud RAN with Ericsson on a 5G commercial network last month;
The introduction of 3rd party radios;
And the development of a unified service management and orchestration (SMO) platform that all vendors can connect to.

“If we can work with one management system that lots of vendors can connect with, that gives us a lot of operational flexibility,” he explained.

Taken together, Elbaz argues that this strategy will allow the company to move towards a state of continuous innovation, uninhibited by the typically cyclical nature of RAN upgrades.

“We’re a tipping point [for Open RAN],” he explained. “Eventually, from an operator point of view […] the value for us will be more players, more innovation, more competition. But we’re also getting to a point where we can evolve the network with just the push of software. The transition is not going to be overnight, but we’re finally at the point where the industry is starting to look at Open RAN and say ‘this is the right time for us’.”

“As an industry, we’re going to stop thinking about the universe in 5- or 10-year windows and actually move towards continuous innovation and continuous progress when it comes to wireless systems,” he added. “Networks will increasingly look like software running on cloud with AI introduced. These are technologies that do not work in 10-year cycles – they move much faster. Our ability to adopt innovation will heavily rely on these more flexible systems.”

Keep up with all the action from Connected America online using the hashtag #ConnectedAmerica

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

Press Release

News

The end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) could see 23 million people lose access to connectivity

On Day 2 of Connected America, a surprise guest took to the stage to issue a rallying cry for affordable connectivity across the USA.

Austin Bonner, Deputy U.S. CTO from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, warned that 23 million people stood to lose affordable connectivity if the ACP’s funding is not renewed and urged a divided Congress to make additional funding a priority.

“Broadband access is a bipartisan issue,” said Bonner. “The pandemic showed that broadband access is a necessity and we need to ensure that every American can be part of the digital world.”

“President Biden has requested $6 billion from Congress to extend the ACP for the rest of the year,” she added, noting that the President “is committed to leaving no communities behind”.

The ACP is a benefit programme that offers eligible households discounts of between $30 to $75 per month for internet services, as well as providing one-time discounts on the purchase of laptops, tablets, and desktop computers.

Despite only around half of eligible households taking advantage of the programme, funding is running out. Currently, the ACP’s last fully funded month is set to be April, with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issuing advice to affected households about finding alternative means of connectivity.

Exactly where this newfound connectivity might come from, however, it unclear. New survey data from FCC showed that nearly half of ACP households had no broadband service or relied wholly on mobile connectivity prior to receiving ACP support.

With many of these households saying that they rely upon ACP-funded connectivity to access vital services like healthcare and education, the negative impact of the programme’s cessation for some of the nation’s most vulnerable people could be severe.

In closing, Bonner thanked the Connected America crowd for their ongoing work to bring broadband access to all Americans and urged them to keep pushing forward.

“We have a lot of work to do together,” she said. “Let’s get this done.”

Keep up with all the action from Connected America online using the hashtag #ConnectedAmerica

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

Alternative network operator Freedom Fibre, which has so far deployed their gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) broadband network to cover 285,000 UK premises (21st Dec 2023) – mostly in the North West of England, has today announced the addition of a third retail ISP to their growing wholesale platform with Squirrel Internet. Until recently, consumers covered […]