Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Merged mobile operator VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK) have announced that they’ve started to roll-out their new Ericsson powered dual-mode and cloud-native 5G Core mobile network, which is said to have a total capacity of 9Tbps (Terabits per second) to help them meet future data demand as mobile broadband usage grows. (more…)
Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Sources have informed ISPreview that alternative UK broadband operator FullFibre Limited, which in 2023 acquired rival Digital Infrastructure (BeFibre) and in 2025 completed its merger with Zzoomm (here), has allegedly put around 50 staff on notice of possible redundancy and appear to be planning to help cut costs by outsourcing customer services offshore. (more…)
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A new report claims that Opus Broadband, which was previously reported to have been working alongside investment firm Alchemy Partners on a potential bid for TalkTalk’s debt-strained consumer business, has decided not to pursue a bid for the ISP after an exclusivity period elapsed. Instead Ares Management may be looking to take long-term ownership of the business. (more…)
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The ITS Technology Group, which has deployed various open access and business-focused Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband ISP and Ethernet networks across parts of the UK, has today announced that 9 of the 13 new full fibre deployment locations (towns and cities) they announced earlier this year have started to go live for customers. (more…)
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Broadband, TV and mobile giant VMO2 (Virgin Media and O2) appears to have followed the creation of a new Consumer unit by making some structural changes to their leadership, which has seen several senior figures depart as part of efforts to reorganise the team to ensure there is “greater prioritisation, simplification, alignment and focus” on the areas that will have the biggest impact. (more…)
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Customers of broadband, phone and TV provider Virgin Media (O2) have recently been informed that the Virgin Media Store, which sold various digital movies and TV box sets to UK consumers, is set to close. But in order for customers to keep their purchases, they’ll need to transfer them to the Rakuten TV service instead. (more…)
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Global internet and network connection benchmarking firm Ookla, which operates the popular Speedtest.net broadband connection testing website and app, has announced that their similarly popular internet outage monitoring service – Downdetector – is to start making a new ‘Pro’ plan available (the existing service is free). But it’ll cost you. (more…)
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Network access provider Openreach has revealed that an overnight software update at their Cowes exchange was behind this week’s broadband and phone outage on the Isle of Wight, which is an island that sits just off the south coast of Hampshire in England. (more…)
Original article Total Telecom:Read More
Broadband engineers fast a myriad of obstacles when deploying fibre to customers’ homes, some of which can result in significant delays. When these issues occur, customers can feel left in the dark, unsure about the specific problems or when installation will ultimately be competed.
Now, Openreach says it is using two new AI services – Crystal Ball and Ask Me Anything (AMA) – to help keep customers better informed and improve satisfaction.
When an issue occurs during complex fibre installation, the AI-powered Crystal Ball pulls information from various sources, including notes from engineers, delay codes, survey outputs, and network topology, to predict the work required and whether it will take more or less than 10 days to complete.
This information is then communicated via text messages within 24 hours of an engineer’s visit, helping ISPs to keep their customers informed and manage expectations.
In tandem, Openreach’s generative AI AMA allows affected customers to ask questions about their installation processes and receive detailed information in response.
Combined, these tools help to prevent more than 3,000 cancellations every month, according to Openreach.
“When an installation hits a snag, the worst thing we can do is leave people guessing. Crystal Ball helps us explain what’s happened, what needs to happen next, and when we expect the job to be done. And we’re going a step further with Ask Me Anything, giving customers the opportunity to ask questions in their own words and get the information and reassurance they need,” explained Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach. “That makes life easier for customers and for the providers we work with. It means fewer people have to chase for updates, and more orders stay on track.”
Both Crystal Ball and AMA are part of Openreach’s wider CXone Proactive AI Agent platform, which it says is designed to make customer communications “more proactive, predictive and conversational”.
AI is increasing becoming a key part of the customer journey throughout the telecoms industry. In a recent survey of telco leaders across the UK and US, 64% said their organisation was already using AI to steer customer journeys.
In future, customer experience will continue to shift from reactive support towards proactive, predictive, and personalised customer journeys that address problems before customers need to chase them.
Also in the news
Shared Rural Network rollout extends to UK national parks with over 150 4G masts live
Vodafone touts latest attempt to bridge the UK’s digital divide
Virgin Media O2 cuts 5,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions
The post Openreach: Ask Me Anything about my Crystal Ball appeared first on Total Telecom.
Original article Total Telecom:Read More
Contributed by Jack Raynor, President, NetExperience
This month, Cambium Networks eliminated 53.6% of its global workforce and placed its UK subsidiary into administration, according to the company’s own SEC filing.
Administrators are now searching for buyers for parts of the business, and the company has said it expects the remaining entities to be wound down. For the partners, resellers, and operators who built businesses on Cambium hardware, the practical questions are immediate. Who supports the deployed base? Where do firmware and security patches come from? What happens to margin if a forced re-platform lands on their own timeline and their own budget?
There’s no satisfaction in watching this play out. Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reasons: competitive pricing, solid performance, and a workable margin. That’s what makes this sting: it wasn’t a bad decision. It’s the risk that comes standard with any single-vendor architecture, regardless of which vendor is chosen.
Related news
Sept. 17: Cambium Networks enters administration
That’s the part worth sitting with. This isn’t really a story about one company’s balance sheet. It’s a recurring pattern. In 2020, pandemic-era supply shocks stranded operators standardized on hardware from vendors with concentrated manufacturing. Today, AI-driven demand for memory is pushing component costs and lead times up industry-wide, squeezing margins operators thought they’d locked in. A vendor’s financial distress is just the latest variant of a risk that has always been present: when a network depends entirely on one company’s continuity, one company’s roadmap, and one company’s supply chain, risk management has effectively been outsourced to someone else’s balance sheet.
The instinctive response is to migrate to another proprietary platform. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t resolve the underlying problem: it relocates the same single point of failure to a different vendor’s name. The network is still betting on one company’s solvency, one company’s release calendar, one company’s supply relationships. If this year has proven anything, it’s that “established vendor” is not the same as “safe vendor.”
This is precisely the scenario the OpenWiFi Project was built to address. Rather than bundling hardware, firmware, and controller into one vendor’s decision, OpenWiFi decouples them: certified white-box access points validated across multiple ODMs and silicon vendors, an open, community-governed management protocol (uCentral), and a choice of commercial or private-cloud controllers that can be swapped without touching a single access point. If one hardware supplier exits the market, tightens supply, or runs into financial trouble, the fleet isn’t stranded, because no single company was ever the whole architecture.
For Cambium’s current customers, that flexibility may run deeper than a future buying decision. It’s worth examining, pending the necessary technical and legal groundwork, whether currently deployed Cambium access points could run OpenWiFi firmware. If so, and with Cambium’s cooperation, affected operators would only need to choose an OpenWiFi-compatible controller, not replace hardware already sitting in their sites. That path isn’t confirmed, but it deserves a look before anyone assumes a full rebuild is the only option.
That’s a materially different risk profile than choosing between competing closed platforms. It doesn’t eliminate business risk; it distributes it, the way any resilient supply chain distributes single points of failure, so one company’s setback doesn’t become every customer’s unplanned capital expense.
None of this is said with any pleasure about what Cambium’s employees and partners are going through. Job losses and forced re-platforming decisions are genuinely hard, and they deserve real support, not a sales pitch dressed up as sympathy. But the industry has now watched this pattern repeat across a pandemic, a component shortage, and now a vendor’s insolvency. Each time, the operators most exposed were the ones with the least architectural flexibility.
As the industry absorbs this news, the more useful question isn’t which vendor to move to next. It’s whether that next platform decision recreates the same dependency or removes it. Open, disaggregated architectures like OpenWiFi won’t prevent the next disruption; nothing can promise that. But they change what a disruption costs: a supplier swap, not a forced, unplanned rebuild.
Jack Raynor served as chair of the TIP OpenWiFi Project and currently sits on the OpenLAN Project Steering Committee. He is president of NetExperience, a founding member of the OpenWiFi community. He welcomes questions and discussion at Ja*********@***********ce.com.
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The post Lessons from the Cambium collapse appeared first on Total Telecom.