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The Wiltshire Council in the South of England has praised rural broadband ISP Wessex Internet for exceeding 40% of its connectivity targets under their £18.8m (public subsidy) Project Gigabit contract for South Wiltshire (Lot 30), which has so far expanded full fibre broadband to reach 7,500 premises in hard-to-reach areas.

The original contract, which was announced back in March 2024, aimed to build their 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband network to cover “around” 14,500 hard-to-reach premises in the area (here). But since then it’s expanded and is currently contracted to reach a total of 18,700 homes and businesses across South Wiltshire over the remaining years.

The operator has been making steady progress on this, which is in stark contrast to some other alternative networks that have struggled or even needed to scale-back or withdraw from their contracts completely due to wider market pressures (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here).

Cllr Helen Belcher said:

“We are delighted with what Wessex Internet has achieved at this early stage of the programme. Their work represents the very best of rural delivery: ambitious, collaborative, and community focused.

One of our key priorities is to ensure our communities have the infrastructure they need to thrive. Wessex Internet’s strong partnerships, commitment to public engagement, and high standards of customer service set a benchmark for others to follow.”

Hector Gibson Fleming, CEO of Wessex Internet, said:

“A brilliant milestone to hit, and a testament to the hard work on the ground.”

The deployment has now been running for over two years and is expected to continue for another three years before reaching completion.

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Carlisle-based alternative broadband provider Grain (Grain Connect) has today published an update on their latest company results, which among other things reveals that their point-to-point full fibre (FTTP) network now covers 300,000 UK premises (up from 270k in Jul 2025) and their customers increased to 56,000 (up from 43k in March 2025).

The altnet, which now serves existing homes across more than 60 urban centres and more than 150 new build developments, has been steadily continuing to deploy new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines at the same time as many of their competitors in the same space have stalled.

The latest results summary, which only offers a limited preview, states that “profitability has continued to improve” (they announced being EBITDA positive back in April 2025), with the network provider now delivering a 10% EBITDA margin across the year (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation). But sadly we don’t get any solid financial figures or information on company losses etc.

Otherwise, Grain reports that EBITDA margins still grew to over 16% during Q4, with Gross margin also expanding from 67% to 77% for the full year. Homes ready for service grew by 19% during the financial year to cover over 300,000 premises across the UK and the rate of expansion is now “expected to accelerate even further in the coming year“.

Customer numbers also increased by 31% to 56,000, with penetration growing to 19% (up from 17% last year). Excluding new sites which went live during the year, penetration on the existing footprint grew from 17% to 21%. Grain’s network typically costs less than a lot of other altnets to deploy, which means that even a modest take-up can be more favourable than it might first appear.

Grain CEO, Richard Cameron, told ISPreview:

“The Altnet market has experienced significant challenges this year, with many providers struggling to deliver an efficient platform to compete in the market.

We are proud to be doing something different and unique amongst altnets; building our own fully owned end-to-end network, giving us an efficient asset that delivers long-term profitability and cash generation.

Others are undoubtedly being hit by the high operating and connection costs driven by the decision to build PIA based networks.

I am pleased to say that these are problems which Grain doesn’t face, putting us in a strong position to compete over the long term.

We’re excited about the future of Grain and the competition and choice it offers, allowing more customers to make the move to Full Fibre broadband, with affordable and transparent pricing.”

Richard added that Grain is “fully funded” and plans to continue investing significant capital into expansion of its footprint, thanks to the “strong financial returns being generated“. But we’ll have to wait for the company’s full results to be published before being able to judge the complete picture.

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Earlier this week Ofcom introduced new measures to help UK mobile operators “block, limit and disrupt scammers” from sending messaging scams (here). The changes, while positive, overlooked the fact that the regulator ended up rejecting an already adopted (in other countries) and UK developed fix that would have been more effective, partly due to BT and others complaining that it would be too “onerous“.

The system we’re talking about above is a mandatory, centralised sender-ID registry (aka – A2P sender ID registration). Ofcom’s announcement, if you dig deep enough, recognised that a mandatory sender ID registration for Application-to-Person Messaging (A2P) messages could be an “effective means to tackle messaging scams“.

In short, when a scammer sends you a text message that says it is from your bank or doctor, the word at the top of the screen is not usually checked by anyone. The sender fills in that field, but some countries have decided to clamp down on this by requiring businesses to register the name they send under, which is more effective at stopping an impersonator’s messages (i.e. they can’t use the same name).

Five countries now mandate registration in this way, including Spain, Ireland, India, Singapore and Australia. The countries differ in how they expect operators to respond to messages from unregistered branded senders (some block it outright, while others flag it as suspicious etc.). Singapore’s regulator reported a 64% fall in SMS scams after it adopted this, and they merely marked messages as “Likely-SCAM” for users to decide.

The Sender ID Protection Registry (SIDPR) actually began in Britain in 2019, as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) that was backed by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), UK Finance and Mobile UK. The funny thing is that SIDPR still exists and is run by the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), albeit as a voluntary solution that charges brands a fee to sign up (many brands use this to protect their SMS messages, although impersonated texts carry no warning).

Sadly, Ofcom this week opted not to make this mandatory, which would have imposed new regulator-led set-up and ongoing costs on brands. So, Britain built it, found it worked, saw it adopted by other countries and then declined to require the same system itself.

Why did Ofcom reject mandatory sender ID registration?

As usual, there are issues of cost and complexity to consider. BT (EE) said that a sender ID registry system would be “expensive, burdensome, and would reduce the ability of individual providers to tackle new, emerging threats” (they also suggested that such systems have not necessarily reduced the volume of scams immediately). The MEF said that a regulator-run registry would also “require public funding and be slow to design and deploy“, while TechUK stated that mandatory sender ID registries have “proved to be cumbersome and risk disrupting A2P traffic flows“.

On the flip side, consumer magazine Which?, Twilio, CCUK, XConnect and The Campaign Registry broadly seemed to support the idea of a mandatory registry to address the industry’s inconsistent application of anti-fraud measures and create a more reliable source for verifying sender IDs. Finally, VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK) liked the idea but wanted it to be adopted via an industry-led model, rather than through the government or regulator.

Ofcom’s Statement

We recognise these comments and, in line with our consultation position, we believe that there would be significant up front and ongoing costs associated with both registering IDs and maintaining a registry. Charging models for a registry could vary, such as charging businesses directly when registering IDs, or charging mobile operators and aggregators to register IDs on behalf of their customers.

Where the costs are charged to companies registering IDs, this is likely to increase costs for aggregators and/or the business end-users that use A2P mobile messaging. These costs could particularly affect small and medium sized businesses, which would have to register to use a sender ID even though they are not likely to be spoofed by scammers. Anybody responsible for setting up and maintaining the registry would generate costs in administering a sender ID registry that people and businesses would ultimately bear. We therefore consider that this approach would represent a more significant intervention than our measures to prevent alphanumeric sender IDs from being abused.

…

At this stage, although we consider such an approach could be an effective way to meet our objective, our view is that we can achieve our objective through the other, less onerous A2P measures set out above. These include requirements for parties onboarding new business senders to check the alphanumeric sender IDs that they intend to use against the legitimate business purposes described in KYC checks, and the maintenance of policies by mobile operators in relation to the use of certain protected or generic alphanumeric IDs and the use of special alphanumeric characters.

Ofcom does clearly recognise that such a registry, even though they’ve rejected the system, could make it “harder for criminals to use alphanumeric sender IDs” by requiring them to be registered centrally before they can be used, with proof that each sender ID is being used for legitimate purposes.

As a result, the regulator has left the door open for them to potentially return to this idea in the future, but for now it’s being left to gather dust on the regulator’s shelf of ideas. Just don’t be surprised if, once scammers adapt to the regulator’s preferred solutions, we end up back here again to consider it once more in the future

However, if Ofcom does ever revive the idea, then we suspect they might end up preferring an industry-led solution to help balance against the cost of implementation by network operators.

“What Ofcom has done is more considered than a refusal. It accepts the registry could work — it says so in terms — and judges it can reach the same place by a lighter route. That’s a legitimate call. The open question is whether the lighter route is lighter for everyone, or only for the businesses that would have had to register,” said Peter — founder of Tutela Digitalis (independent fraud education).

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Openreach (BT) has launched a new trial on Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP lines, which so far as we can tell appears to be based on an earlier Proof of Concept (PoC) that will make it easier for the operator to determine, in real-time, whether a network incident or Planned Engineering Work (PeW) is affecting a customer’s live service.

The network access provider’s public briefing on the FTTP trial for pre-emptive incidents and PeWs provides no useful information to help explain it (here), but we have managed to extract some details from a few of our sources. At present trying to identify whether a network incident or PeW activity has impacted a customer’s live service usually relies on assumptions based on the network elements involved.

The new approach aims to try and take those assumptions out of the equation and produce something much more accurate, which can operate in real-time and then proactively communicate with end customers directly using SMS. The original PoC for this is understood to have gone well, thus the new trial is an attempt to expand that in order to gather more data before a final decision on implementation.

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Broadband, phone and TV provider Virgin Media (O2) has introduced a new technology – created in-house – that harnesses AI-powered robots to monitor TV services in real time (i.e. more than 220 IPTV channels), which can be used to help the provider spot and resolve issues faster than ever before.

The AI robots, in-between planning their overthrow of the human race (kidding.. I think), are designed to watch TV services exactly as customers experience them and, using automated monitoring, continuously check channels for any degradation of service, including any issues with video and audio quality. Whether or not these bots do this while clutching an ice-cold beer and swearing at the screen during sport content is another matter.

Naturally, any issues that do get detected will then be automatically flagged to human monitoring teams, where the issues can be investigated and hopefully resolved, all with greater accuracy than ever before. The most-watched of the 220 IPTV channels will be checked every six minutes, although it’s unclear how often the bots will check niche channels.

Jeanie York, VMO2’s Chief Technology Officer, said:

“Creating and launching these new TV robots means we’re able to identify and address any service issues faster and more accurately than ever before, and in some cases before a customer even realises there was a problem.

Whether our customers are watching the big final on Sunday or other live sport, their favourite film or the season finale of their favourite programme, reliable TV makes these moments possible. This new capability is another innovative step in giving our customers a great experience and ensuring we provide the reliable TV service they expect.”

The new system is still being improved, and additional enhancements are already being planned for the future, including how AI can be used to identify a broader range of service issues and further strengthen monitoring capabilities. Hopefully in the course of watching Goggle Box or Coronation Street the new AI bots don’t self-terminate or try to wipe out the human race in revenge for the torture they’ve received.

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Network analyst firm Streetwave has confirmed that they’ve been chosenb y Cornwall Council in England to survey mobile network coverage and 4G / 5G data performance across the region, harnessing 7,250km of the county’s road network and testing all three of the primary mobile networks – EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK).

Just to recap. Streetwave works by harnessing waste bin (refuse) collection lorries to map mobile network coverage and data speeds across various parts of the UK (e.g. here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, refuse trucks are installed with several off-the-shelf Smartphones using special software, which run continuous network tests (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas) as the vehicles go around their routes.

The data they collect is often then used by local authorities to help identify areas that may require additional intervention in order to improve local mobile coverage and or network capacity, while also giving locals access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/).

The survey will run throughout July and August 2026, providing “valuable insight into how tourism impacts mobile infrastructure across one of the UK’s busiest visitor destinations” and helping the local authority to identify connectivity gaps, support future digital connectivity interventions, and ensure staff working across the region can access the best-performing networks. The results should be available to the public a bit later in the year.

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The latest data from broadband ISP BT (EE) has revealed that Wednesday’s night’s semi-final FIFA World Cup 2026 football match between England and Argentina triggered the “largest live streaming event ever seen” on the internet provider’s national network.

Streaming traffic is said to have exceeded BT’s previous record by nearly 30%, driven in part by customers tuning in via the BBC’s exclusive 4K iPlayer viewing experience. The record came during a tournament in which England’s matches generated significant increases in traffic through both BBC iPlayer and ITVX, although outside of streaming they didn’t have a dramatic impact.

BT compared the peak streaming traffic during each match with the peak recorded during the equivalent time window in an average week. The analysis found increases ranging from 160% to 683%, with Mexico v England producing the largest proportional uplift.

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The Comms Council UK, which represents the UK’s national Unified Communications and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) phone industry, has today revealed the winners of their 18th annual 2026 awards event at a ceremony at Kitty Hawk in London. Some of the winners include Nebula, 8×8, Zayo and Daktela others.

Tracey Wright, Chair of Comms Council UK Council, said: “This was another brilliant CCUK Awards ceremony. It was great to see an exceptional response to new categories for AI and CX, reflecting the rapid pace of the industry and new developments in telecoms. Congratulations to all the winners and highly commended organisations.”

The winners are usually independently reviewed by several judges, although we couldn’t find a list of the panel members. As usual, there was also no specific category for consumer VoIP phone services, although in the past the SOHO (Small Office / Small Home) category did get a little bit closer to that, but they dropped that category for 2026.

Comms Council UK Awards 2026 Winners

Best Communications Provider Mid Market

Winner – Nebula

Highly Commended – bOnline

Best Communications Provider Enterprise

Winner – 8×8

Highly Commended – LoopUp

Best CX Experience

Winner – TSI and The TSI Partner Portal

Best Risk Defence Solution

Winner – Fuse 2 Communications

Best AI-Powered Communications

Winner – Daktela

Highly Commended – Fuse 2 Communications

Best Communications Enabler

Winner – Zayo Europe

Highly Commended – Netaxis – Fusion

Best Innovation

Winner – Nebula – CallSwitch One

Highly Commended – Elisha Telecom – Agentic AI Communications Ecosystem

Rising Star Award

Winner – NUWAVE Communications

Highly commended – Access4

Women in Telecoms Champion

Obiageli Okafor

Alongside her role as a Senior Product Manager at 8×8, she is an award winning advocate for women in technology. A TechWomen100 Winner, She Inspires Award winner and founding member of UNWomen UK, she has dedicated her career to opening doors for others. Through PMHelp, she has built one of the UK’s fastest growing product communities, reaching over 52,000 learners across 70+ countries through mentorship, training, internships and career development, with a strong focus on helping women break into and thrive in technology.

Outstanding Achievement Award

Adam Carter and Richard Clarke from National Trading Standards Scams Team

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The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has opened investigations into several alternative full fibre broadband networks (altnets) – including Internetty, Cambridge Fibre Networks, Optical Fibre Infrastructure, Pine Media and Trooli – after they found “reasonable grounds to believe” that they may not be meeting their duties to show they have secured funds for meeting their liabilities.

Breaking news.. more to follow..

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Contributed Article

The BoGuan LLM is enabling millions of visitors to enjoy historically accurate experiences from China’s ancient capital

Xi’an, situated in Shaanxi province, is one of the most celebrated cities in all of China. Internationally renowned as the home of the Terracotta Army, the city served as China’s capital for over 1,000 years under 13 different dynasties. Today, it is one of China’s largest domestic tourism destinations, attracting around 330 million visitors annually.

With the rapid rise of AI, the way in which tourists interact with the city is changing. As generative AI becomes increasingly commonplace, tourists are beginning to expect conversational, personalised digital experiences when visiting cultural sites. The problem, however, is that these models do not have access to specialised historical data and so cannot deliver truly unique – and historically accurate – experiences for consumers.

This is why Huawei and Shaanxi Culture Industry Investment Group (SCG) have co-developed BoGuan, the world’s first commercial multimodal large language model (LLM) dedicated to cultural tourism. The partners spent two years compiling a 1.2 Petabyte dataset consisting of 31 million images, 4.4 million minutes of video, and 960 million pieces of structured text to form a specialised foundation for the platform. BoGuan then leverages this data, acting as a unified gateway aggregating 10 open and closed-source models (including Huawei’s PanGu).

“General large models lack specialized knowledge in museology, archaeology and history, making it difficult to meet the nuanced demands of niche scenarios,” noted Edric Chu, General Manager of Huawei’s Shaanxi Rep Office. “We completed 12 high-quality cultural tourism datasets […] using Huawei Cloud Data Engineering to process and label text, images, audio and video […] Supported by three major standards of data collection, management, and circulation, the platform transforms raw data resources into data assets with verifiable ownership.”

New cultural experiences and revenue opportunities

BoGuan underpins a wide range of cultural tourism services across the province, including AI travel assistants, multilingual tour guidance, museum interpretation, AI-generated marketing content, digital preservation of cultural heritage, and short-form video production.

In the B2B sector, BoGuan powers an AI “Video Factory” that fully automates short drama and advertisement production. Meanwhile, for consumers, the model powers ‘Xiaoqi’, an AI travel companion on the GO-SHAANXI app, and the Zhiying Camera mini program, which allows tourists to instantly merge their photos with AI-generated historical settings.

Since its pilot launch in September last year, Huawei says applications powered by BoGuan have reached more than four million users, and it is already delivering a major revenue boost for SCG.

“With the same team size, thanks to these technologies[…] from last year to this June our revenue has increased by roughly 30–40%,” explained Jin Yan, Chairman of the Digital and Intelligent Culture Technology Group at SCG. “The sales of related digital collectibles and creative products have exceeded 2 million Chinese yuan ($300,000).”

SCG has already begun collaborating with tourism authorities in Xinjiang and Guizhou to replicate the BoGuan framework, with the goal of potentially exporting it nationwide in future.

Network infrastructure foundation

Of course, to successfully deploy BoGuan at scale requires powerful network and data infrastructure. Thousands of simultaneous AI interactions require both massive data throughput and dense computing capabilities.

To solve this, SCG’s runs on an on-premise 48P computing platform built with Huawei’s SuperPoD architecture. It uses Huawei’s UnifiedBus technology, an interconnect protocol for SuperPoD that interconnects physical servers so that they can learn, think, and reason like a single logical server.

At the same time, China Telecom Shaanxi and Huawei have blanketed Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall with a 5G Advanced network capable of delivering downlink speeds of 3.5 Gbps and uplink speeds of 600 Mbps. This, the partners explain, is crucial to support the scale of AI use cases being accessed throughout the region.

“The Grand Tang Mall is a textbook example of a high-traffic, high-concurrency, and high-interaction scenario, which poses an immense challenge for any network,” explained Wang Hao, Director of Mobile Communications Network Business at China Telecom Shaanxi. “Within this area […] we have deployed 46 base stations within this compact area, a density that far exceeds standard regions.”

These base stations are also equipped with AI-powered intelligent control boards that can trigger service acceleration protocols when AI photo generation is taking place.

“The embedded AI intelligently and dynamically allocates network resources to match your real-time demands,” Wang said, noting that the network can support 23,000 concurrent users during holiday traffic surges.

Bridging the AI talent gap

Beyond the technology itself, another key them to emerge from discussions about BoGuan – and about creating purpose-built LLMs for other vertical industries – is the lack of workers skilled in both AI usage and their specialist field.

“The industry faces a deficit of millions of interdisciplinary professionals who bridge the gap between cultural tourism and AI,” said Chu. “Shaanxi alone faces a talent gap of 30,000 to 50,000 in culture tourism plus AI, and the national gap is expected to exceed 1 million by 2030.”

As a result, further developing BoGuan and similar LLM projects faces a significant talent bottleneck that can only be overcome through largescale training projects.

“SCG, Huawei, and over 10 institutions have jointly established a talent training base […] aligning vocational certificates with Huawei AI certifications and university micro-majors,” explained Chu. “We expect to train over 1,000 people this year and more than 3,000 next year.”

Proof of vertical AI success

The success of BoGuan is a demonstration of how purpose-built AI models can create new revenue opportunities for telecom operators by combining connectivity, cloud, AI compute and industry expertise into a single commercial platform. Rather than competing solely on network capacity, operators must move to monetise vertical AI through managed services, industry-specific applications, and data products. With its unified AI infrastructure, platform-level scalability, and training on vertical-industry data, the BoGuan LLM helps industries tackle bottlenecks in content production, cost management, capability integration, and data security—ensuring that AI can be practically deployed to fuel sustainable business growth. This same model, in turn, serves as a blueprint for telecom operators seeking to generate lasting growth in the AI era.” Artificial intelligence is not simply a stack of technologies,” concluded Chu. “[In Shaanxi] it has become a key enabler that can activate thousands of years of cultural heritage, reshape travel experiences, and inject new momentum into the industry.”

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