News

The mergers come alongside a new cash injection of £250 million from Macquarie Capital, Israel Infrastructure Fund (IIF), and Tiger Infrastructure Partners

This week, Macquarie Capital, IIF, and Tiger Infrastructure Partners have jointly announced that Broadway Partners, Cadence Networks, and SWS Broadband will all be merged into Voneus, effective immediately.

The deal will also see the trio of investors inject up to £250 million into Voneus, with the debt fund raise led by Macquarie.

Voneus primarily focusses on serving rural customers in the UK with superfast broadband via fixed wireless access (FWA) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), having identified roughly 200,000 rural premises that could benefit from a technology upgrade. These lofty goals, alongside the company’s participation in the UK government’s Project Gigabit, have helped Voneus to attract significant investment in recent years, most notably from Macquarie in 2019 (further increased in 2021) and IIF 2021.

But despite the scale of the company’s ambitions, Voneus currently only covers roughly 10,000 premises in England and Wales.

Now, the company is set to receive a much-needed boost via a merger with Cadence Networks and SWS Broadband, two broadband providers both owned by Rural Broadband Solutions Holdings, which, in turn, is majority owned by Tiger Infrastructure Partners.

As a result of the deal, Tiger Infrastructure will become a major shareholder in Voneus.

Alongside directly absorbing SWS and Cadence Networks, Voneus will also merge with Broadband Partners, a fibre altnet that Tiger Infrastructure and Macquarie have now rescued from administration.

Launched in 2016, Broadway Partners is fibre altnet that once intended to connect up to 250,000 homes and businesses by 2025, focussing mainly on rural areas in Scotland and Wales. However, against the economic background of rising costs and soaring interest rates, the company has struggled to remain afloat in recent years, finally entering administration in May.

Two weeks ago, rumours began to circulate that Macquarie and Tiger Infrastructure Partners were seeking to acquire Broadway – rumours that now appear to have come true.

Exactly how many customers this trio of mergers will add to Voneus’ national footprint remains unclear, though Broadway Partners administration filing suggested they currently covered around 11,000 premises.

The scale of the mergers can be somewhat inferred, however, by Voneus’ new rollout goals, with the company now aiming to serve around 350,000 premises across the UK via both FTTP and FWA.

“This is a very exciting time for Voneus, and for our new partners, shareholders, and the communities we serve,” said Christopher Traggio, CEO of Voneus Broadband. “We have the backing of our shareholders to accelerate our roll-out plan, which we know will make a positive impact as we all share the same focus to deliver innovative broadband solutions to communities across the UK.”

“Welcoming SWS Broadband, Cadence Networks and Broadway Partners into Voneus provides us with even more opportunities to support businesses, individuals, and communities to thrive – fostering economic development, education, and communication to help improve the overall quality of life no matter where they are from,” he added.

In recent years, spurred by on by favourable regulation and government subsidies, the UK’s fibre market has grown rapidly, spawning over 100 altnets across the country. More recently, however, the strained economy has seen investment slow and costs rise, inevitably steering the industry towards consolidation. This combination from Voneus is one of the first significant tie-ups in this regard, but it is unlikely to be the last.

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News

400G connectivity is increasingly becoming the standard for businesses worldwide 

 

Zayo Group, a leading global communications infrastructure provider, has announced that its network in Europe is fully 400G enabled. 

The upgraded network will allow businesses, carriers, datacentres, and hyperscalers to gain access to high bandwidth, low latency connectivity throughout Europe.  

Zayo’s European network is connected to five subsea cables. Three of these are owned and operated by Zayo, powering 2,500 on-net buildings, 125 core points-of-presence , and 16 metro fibre markets. 

“Our customers are increasingly taking advantage of bandwidth-intensive applications to keep up with the competition – from AI and IoT to advanced analytics – which require significantly higher bandwidth and low latency connectivity,” said Zayo’s European managing director Yannick Leboyer in a statement. 

“Our ultimate goal is to ensure our global clients can remain on the cutting edge. That’s why we’re committed to the continued enhancement and modernization of our network to provide the fastest, most reliable connectivity.” 

Research from Omdia, in partnership with Ciena, showed that companies are increasingly shifting to 400G services, with 74% relying on high-capacity services like 400G connect with enterprise locations or cloud providers, and 58% rely on it for data centre-to-data centre communication. 

“Customers are now starting to buy 400G wave services across Europe, turning this from a niche to a real market,” said Will Rhodes, CMS Consultant at Ciena. 

“They are looking to achieve the highest capacity to support their business outcomes whilst delivering on their sustainability goals. 400G will support the ever-increasing data demand driven by new applications such AI and the aggregation of Machine-to-Machine connectivity.” 

Zayo’s North American network is scheduled to be fully 400G enabled by the end of next year. 

Earlier this year, Zayo’s Operations Vice President James Ovel spoke with Total Telecom following the installation of its new subsea cable, Zeus, connecting the UK to mainland Europe. Zayo claims Zeus to be the most secure subsea cable in the world, with the company noting its interesting deployment process, which included detonating a number of discovered sea mines from World War II. 

Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscriber to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here   

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News

The ship is set to replace a vessel that has been in service since 1983 

Orange Marine, the subsidiary of French telco group Orange that specialises in submarine cable operations, is launching a new ship dedicated to the maintenance and repair of critical subsea cables.  

The ship, named the ‘Sophie Germain’, is 100 metres in length and includes a 450 kW ROV (remotely operated vehicle) that is used to cut, inspect, and bury the fibre optic cable that is stored on board. 

Orange claim that their new “state-of-the-art” ship will bring a “new era of sustainability in the subsea cable and broader network industry”, using less fuel than previous models I and emitting 20% less carbon dioxide and82% less nitrogen oxide. 

“It is with great pride that we inaugurate today the Sophie Germain, a new generation cable ship,” said Christel Heydemann, CEO of Orange, in a press release. 

“Through this launch, the Orange group reaffirms its central role in the laying and maintenance of submarine cables, a little-known industry and yet an essential base for the development of connectivity around the world. At the cutting-edge of technology and thanks to a reduced environmental footprint, the Sophie Germain contributes to the Group’s sustainable innovation approach to respond to the major challenges of our time.” 

Orange is a major player in the subsea cable industry, with its ships having installed 257,000 km of submarine fibre optic cables and made over 800 repairs, as of the end of 2023. 

The launch of new cable ships in the subsea industry is a rarity. There are only around 60 cable ships in the world designed for the deployment and maintenance of subsea cables. 

There were only five new vessels launched since 2004, and 19 of the ships currently in use are over 30 years old. New ships can often cost over $100 million to develop, with many operators choosing to repurpose older vessels to save costs. 

Before the deployment of the ‘Sophie Germain’, Orange Marine’s last new ship was the Pierre de Fermat in 2014.

Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscriber to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here  

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PRESS RELEASE

TM Forum’s annual Digital Transformation World (DTW) is a major event in the communications industry, where innovation comes to life, inspiration is sparked, connections are made, and knowledge is gained. Around 3500+ attendees, 50+ CSP VPs, and above from 100+ countries joined this event. Network automation is a hot topic and it is one of the 5 main tracks during this exhibition.

As the front runner of this digital era from the African continent, MTN shows its impressive influence in this industry. Mr. Mohamed Salah, Head of Network Operation and Transformation joined the release of TM Forum Autonomous Networks white paper 5.0 (Autonomous Networks: Empowering digital transformation – evolving from Level 2/3 towards Level 4 (IG1326)) as a contributor.

Figure 1: TM Forum Autonomous Networks white paper 5.0 release

After the white paper release, he also delivered a keynote speech titled “Leading Africa’s Progress of Autonomous Network” at the Autonomous Networks summit in DTW 2023.

Figure 2: Mr. Mohamed Salah, Head of Network Operation and Transformation, MTN Group

Strategy

MTN, the largest mobile network operator in Africa, provides voice, data, fintech, digital, enterprise, wholesale, and API services to more than 290 million customers in 19 markets.

During the speech, Mr. Mohamed Salah provided insights into MTN’s company strategy “Ambition 2025” and the technical strategy “PACE” (Platform, Agile, Connectivity, and Experience) which anchors to accelerating the PACE of Ambition 2025.

Within PACE, value-based automation is one of the most important pillars, and it is charged with the adaptation of autonomous networks into MTN’s network.

Strategy to Implementation Approach

From 2021, MTN has embarked on its journey to the Autonomous Networks. In 2023, MTN passed through the milestones of consensus & standardization and started to focus on commercial promotion. “For autonomous network implementation, we have a clear understanding that value-based automation is the key.”, introduced by Mr. Mohamed Salah.

A 3-D model of Service, Network, and Value Stream is used to select the value scenario, where service refers to service experience and service type (ToB/ToC/ToH/…), Network refers to the infrastructure (transport, IP, RAN, etc.) and Value Stream mainly refer to the operation flow. After the certain scenario passed the value scenario selection, it entered the 4-step iteration loop of the autonomous network level including assessment, Gap analysis, Solution Design, and Implementation to promote the autonomous network level of each scenario.

Achievements

Up until 2023, MTN has implemented 21 autonomous network use cases in 5 OpCos. During the presentation, Mr. Mohamed Salah also introduced some of their cases cooperated with Huawei.

Intelligent load shedding management: South Africa is facing a power supply issue and suffering load shedding daily. In 2023, there were 1176 hours of total power outage up to week 29, which had a big effect on the network availability and customer satisfaction. Proactive management was implemented to address this challenge. With the load shedding plan from the power supplier and the network data such as traffic, and site location as input, the same make intelligent scheduling to for battery replacement, mobile generator deployment, and fuel refilling. The work orders are dispatched automatically to close timely in advance to avoid site outages.

After the system was implemented, the network availability improved by 4% compared with before.

Best experience mobile backhaul: NPS (Net Promoter Score) is important to MTN, to support this goal, a best experience mobile backhaul network is mandatory. Traffic engineering to avoid network congestion used to be a time-consuming and highly required workload. MTN implemented a network digital map to have real-time awareness of the network resource status information such as pack lost rate (PLR), site availability, link availability, etc. The dynamic paths are calculated and the traffic optimization engineering is carried out automatically. After this autonomous network use case was implemented, more than 12k times of automatic traffic engineering was done by the system, and network traffic increased by 15%. This automatic traffic engineering effectively avoids user traffic suppression caused by network congestion and provides important support for the network NPS.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Mohamed Salah shared the MTN autonomous network framework blueprint (2023) with the whole industry as a reference for all the attendees to know MTN’s strategy and practices in Autonomous Networks.

 

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