Internet, phone and TV provider BT (EE) has long bundled Xbox Game Passes on some of their broadband packages, particularly full fibre (FTTP) plans, which until recently often included a free 6-12 month subscription to the online gaming service. But some customers now complain the ISP has charged them for the service, without their knowledge […]

In an expected development, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has today launched a formal Phase 1 investigation into the proposed mega-merger (here) between mobile operators Three UK and Vodafone, which will slash the number of mobile operators in the market from four to three and may impact upon competition, consumer prices, jobs and security. […]

A tricky conflict over eligibility for gigabit broadband vouchers and state aid subsidised contracts via the UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit scheme, which is overseen by the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) agency, appears to be disrupting the roll-out of full fibre (FTTP) networks in some rural parts of the country. Just to recap. Project Gigabit […]

The ongoing efforts by investment group Fern Trading (Octopus Investments) to consolidate all four of their alternative UK full fibre broadband ISP networks (here) – Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre, Giganet and AllPoints Fibre – has reached a critical point, with customers starting to be migrated to a central retail provider, Cuckoo. The consolidation drive, which […]

UK ISP Quickline, which is building a new gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) broadband network across parts of England, has announced that their network has just gone live across three new villages – Burton, Navenby and Metheringham – in rural Lincolnshire (total of over 2,000 extra premises passed). Residential customers reached by their new full fibre […]

Network operator CityFibre, which is rolling out a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the United Kingdom, has provided an update on their ambitions to boost their full fibre coverage by acquiring some of the other operators in the alternative network space. Last week saw the company reveal that their FTTP network had […]

Broadband ISP and telecoms giant BT have today confirmed that they will recruit another 500 apprentices and graduates in 2024 (up from 400 in 2023) – forming part of their September 2024 intake. The roles will span across areas such as engineering (5G, FTTP etc.), customer service, applied research, data analytics and cyber-security. As usual, […]

Mobile network analyst firm RootMetrics (Ookla) has published their latest biannual H2 2023 benchmark study of UK mobile networks (4G and 5G) and mobile broadband performance, which once again sees EE (BT) come top against rivals at Vodafone, Three UK and O2 (VMO2). But the picture for 5G performance isn’t so clear-cut. The latest study […]

News 

The loan will be used to help Jio purchase 5G equipment from Nokia, with the Indian operator racing to deploy the new technology  

India’s leading telecoms operator Reliance Jio has secured a loan of almost $2 billion to find its purchase of 5G equipment from Nokia. 

Reportedly arranged by HSBC, the loan is one the country’s biggest offshore loans for the 2024 financial year. The deal with Nokia was secured in October last year.

“The deal was concluded recently after talks over the past couple of months with HSBC as lead arranger… the loan quantum is around $1.5–2 billion, and it is structured in a way that carries with it an implied rate of interest arrived over the tenure of the loan,” reported the Economic Times. 

Reliance Jio has ambitious plans for its 5G deployment. During the firm’s Annual General Meeting in August this year, Chairman Mukesh Ambani promised to achieve nationwide standalone 5G coverage by the end of the year. If achieved, Ambani claims the 5G rollout will have been the fastest anywhere in the world. 

“With this massive reach and capacity, here is our promise: We know that every home, small and medium businesses, factories, schools, and hospitals across India would like to have 5G. From December this year, we will be able to promptly fulfil each and every demand for Jio 5G broadband connection across the country,” he said.  

Alongside Nokia, Jio is also working Ericsson and Samsung for 5G equipment. In September of this year, the Jio announced the arrangement of a similar $2 billion offshore loan to fund the purchase of 5G equipment from Ericsson, arranged by BNP-Paribas. 

Thanks to this huge investment, Jio is already making impressive progress with its rollout, having recently passed 50 million 5G subscribers. Jio also claims that it operates 85% of the country’s operational 5G cell sites. 

However, Jio is not the only operator making swift progress when it comes to 5G. Bharti Airtel, Jio’s main rival, said this weekend that it had also passed the 50 million 5G subscriber market. 

How is the 5G Standalone market evolving in 2023? Find out at this year’s find out at this year’s Total Telecom Congress, live from Amsterdam, 21-22 November 2023   

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European telco CEOs pen open letter calling for ‘Fair Share’ legislation 

Contributed Article

by Dr Ishwar Parulkar, Chief Technology Officer for the Telco Industry at AWS

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), a type of AI that is capable of producing new content such as conversations, stories, images, videos, music, and code, continues to make headlines on how it will transform industries – telco included.

Anticipated growth is substantial. In fact, our own survey of telco leaders, facilitated with Altman Solon, found that adoption of generative AI use cases will grow from the current 19% adoption to 48% within the next two years.

While there are many use cases for how telcos can embrace generative AI, we see adoptions occurring in three waves.

 

Telco use cases across three waves of adoption

The first wave will take advantage of foundation models and capabilities that exist today, largely in customer experience (CX). Telcos already leverage AI to enhance interactions and resolution speed, and according to our survey, almost all (92%) respondents selected customer service and chatbots as a high likelihood to implement. In fact, among those respondents, 63% said the deployment was already in production. Embracing generative AI can further this progress with interactive voice response and real-time call analysis to provide prompts and resources for agents to help resolve customer inquiries. Customer service agents will still play a key role in the process, but generative AI can improve every customer interaction.

The second wave will comprise fine-tuning foundation models for telco purposes using proprietary data. One early example of this is the work Snowflake and DigitalRoute recently showcased to combine data from billing support systems (BSS) and operational support systems (OSS). Using Llama 2, an open-source foundation model fathered by Meta, and trained using Amazon SageMaker, this solution can help telcos more easily pinpoint and resolve network performance issues impacting key customers.

This can also be applied to challenges such as revenue leakage or optimising profits. At TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World, Salesforce showcased a new demo that uses Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Sagemaker Jumpstart to fine-tune models and combine data for use cases including revenue assurance, employee dispatching, and empowering customer service agents with meaningful real-time insights.

The third and final wave will be focused on creating new industry specific foundation models trained on telco specific data, for example standards specifications and data from the network and its operations. While two-thirds of telcos (65%) anticipate training off-the-shelf models to meet their needs, a cohort of 15% indicated a desire to build foundation models in-house.

We see opportunities for independent AI software vendors and early telco adopters of this technology  to work together to use network data to build wholly new foundation models that can address network function software design, network design and configuration and network failure resolution related use cases. We’re already seeing some early movers in this space. For example, SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel announced a Global Telco AI Alliance and collaboration with Anthropic to develop a new global telco-focused large language model. Not only will these efforts benefit the telcos and the industry, it also creates a new potential line of revenue for telcos to monetise their assets.

Generative AI begins with a data strategy

Regardless of which wave of use case telcos pursue, the most important piece is a solid foundational data strategy. Generative AI is only as good as the data it uses and the platform it is built on.  Our survey found that organisations ranking in the top 30% for data proficiency are outpacing their peers in using generative AI.

Yet equally important is protecting that data. For some generative AI use cases, telcos need to customise existing large language models (LLMs) using company proprietary data. In using these publicly available LLMs, there is concern that proprietary company data could be embedded into the public model itself, creating intellectual property risk. Two-thirds (61%) of surveyed telcos indicated concerns around data security, privacy, and governance. Business and IT leaders should therefore work hand-in-hand with their security, compliance, and legal teams to identify and mitigate these risks, ensuring the secure and responsible deployment of generative AI. Moreover, businesses should carefully plan for compliance with regulations and consider the ownership of the data used.

Before commercially deploying any kind of AI application, it is key that businesses consider their existing data organisation and data platform strategy, and assess the expected return on investment. Certain applications will deliver greater impact depending on the available data. That said, we firmly believe that AI represents the most profoundly transformative technology of our era, with generative AI opening doors to incredible new opportunities that every business in the UK can and should consider tapping into.

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