Mobile operator EE has successfully deployed two new 4G (mobile broadband) mobile masts at Rackwick (Hoy) and Stronsay on Orkney, one of north Scotland’s most remote island communities, as part of the Scottish Government’s £28.75m 4G Infill Programme (S4GI). The S4GI programme, which is also being supported by the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) and WHP […]

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The deal, valued at 6.25 billion Danish crowns ($919.95 million), will allow Norlys to provide mobile connectivity to customers alongside its existing fixed broadband and electricity services

This week, Swedish multinational telecoms group Telia has announced its intention to sell its Danish unit to Norlys, Denmark’s largest integrated energy and telecommunications group.

The deal is valued at 6.25 billion Danish crowns ($919.95 million) and will see Norlys will directly inherit around 1.7 million mobile customers from Telia Denmark, as well as half of TT-Netvaerket, Telia Denmark’s infrastructure joint venture with Telenor.

Norlys currently has around 800,000 owner-members and has around 800,000 premises passed with fibre, as of 2022. It currently provides energy and broadband services to over a million households across Denmark.

With the acquisition of Telia Denmark, Norlys will now be able to provide mobile services as well as fibre broadband, thereby creating a converged operator with scale enough to take on the market leaders TDC and Telenor.

Norlys has had ambitions of becoming a converged telecoms operator for some time now, with the company having first expressed these ambitions back in the summer of 2020.

“Combining Telia’s mobile network with our fibre business will enable Norlys to provide a full-service solution in Denmark, paving the way for significant growth opportunities,” said Norlys CEO, Niels Duedahl.

The funds for the deal will presumably be provided, at least in part, by Norlys’ recent sale of 35% of its fibre business, Norlys Tele, to a consortium formed by Dutch pension fund PGGM and French energy group EDF’s investment arm, EDF Invest. The deal was first announced in March last year, though the financial details have been kept confidential.

For Telia, meanwhile, the sale will allow the operator to simplify its international portfolio, allowing it to “focus even more on markets where we can sustain or build a leading position,” according to company President and CEO Allison Kirkby.

As always, the deal is subject to the typical regulatory scrutiny from regulators, with the parties hoping to clos the deal in Q1 2024.

How is the European telecoms landscape changing in 2023? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Total Telecom Congress event live in Amsterdam  

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Some operators of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband ISP networks in the UK have expressed concern to ISPreview after Ofcom appeared to toughen their stance on the compliance of related hardware with their rules. Some providers fear this could effectively ban their kit, reduce choice in the market and push up costs. The issue stems […]

VIEWPOINT

The demand for more connected experiences, both at home and at work, continues to grow in all geographies. This means that the Communications Service Providers (CSPs) need to rethink their strategies to provide a world-class experience in the indoor environment. As a result, CSPs are exploring different technology solutions to offer a truly differentiated customer experience.

Brazil’s Oi, the first operator in Latin America to launch FTTR, announced the Oi Fibra X strategy last year to provide high-quality connectivity solutions in the country. It is working with Huawei to provide its subscribers with a truly differentiated indoor experience.

“Our strategic goal is to make fiber our core pillar of positioning and achieve leadership in the Brazilian broadband landscape. We are already leader in most of the cities where we launched the fiber service. But, of course, we need to keep differentiating ourselves, and the FTTR [Fiber-to-the-Room] will be a key element, mainly for the higher end segment of consumers that are much more demanding in terms of quality of service,” says Rogerio Takayanagi, SVP Retail and Enterprise, CSO of Brazil Oi. He was speaking during a joint interview with Feng Zhishan, President of Huawei’s Optical Access Product Line.

He explained that houses are made of brick in Brazil, which impacts indoor penetration of Wi-Fi, thus affecting the overall quality of experience. This means that even if consumers purchase higher speeds, they don’t get the desired experience, which leads to frustration.

“When we extend the indoor coverage through the FTTR, we believe that consumers will really realize the power of the fiber. So, the value proposition of the fiber to the room or gigabit to the room is something that definitely differentiates our service and positions our brand much higher,” said Rogerio Takayanagi.

 

Partnering for growth

Oi launched FTTR in Blumenau, and after witnessing a massive increase in its adoption, it is now planning to roll out FTTR across the country. “Partnering with Huawei, the idea is to increase the volumes and extend the use case not only to the end consumers, the residential business, but also the small and medium enterprises. We’re seeing several use cases of people and companies that demand higher coverage and better consistency in their service,” said Rogerio Takayanagi.

With both residential premises and offices likely to become more digital and intelligent, the CSPs need to reimagine their strategy to ensure a best-in-class consumer experience.

Growing importance of FTTR

Explaining the growing relevance of FTTR, Feng Zhishan said, “First, FTTR is driven by the requirements for the digital home, which has transformed from entertainment center to multi-center of digital applications, such as online education, online office, immersive XR experiences, and whole-house intelligence. The demands for high-quality Wi-Fi networks has increased dramatically, posing higher requirements on data rate, coverage, latency, and concurrent connections.”

He further elaborated that 451 CSPs have released gigabit broadband packages, and the number of gigabit users has reached 120 million. However, substandard Wi-Fi experience is limiting the growth of broadband. This can be addressed by using the FTTR approach.

“Limited by Wi-Fi capabilities, it is easy to provide gigabit in the doorway but difficult to provide megabit in rooms. However, FTTR extends a fiber to each room, making gigabit Wi-Fi experience ubiquitous indoors,” said Feng Zhishan. It is then not surprising that CSPs are actively promoting FTTR. It has already been put into commercial use by 87 provincial operators in China and 15 operators outside China.

FTTR extends fiber to all terminals at home or office and helps operators go from FTTH to FTTR, thus increasing user loyalty and ARPU while building a high-end brand. In line with Huawei’s approach of working with telcos for cooperation and innovation, it has worked with CSPs to launch the world’s first-generation FTTR for Home solution in 2020 and developed three generations of FTTR products.

Commenting on the advantages offered by FTTR, Feng Zhishan said, “First, it provides over 1000 Mbps Wi-Fi to each room in a house. Second, supports up to 17 information points to eliminate coverage blind spots. Third, ensures smooth Wi-Fi experience without frame freezing using imperceptible roaming when users move around the house. Fourth, supports intelligent management, and enables operators to remotely identify problems and optimize Wi-Fi performance, reducing home visits and quickly rectifying problems.”

Industry collaboration must to provide high-quality experience

As the demand for superior connectivity continues to grow, Huawei will work closely with global customers and industry partners to achieve high-quality development of the gigabit all-optical home industry. On the other hand, Huawei and Oi will collaborate to carry out technological innovation and cooperative research in the FTTR field, overcome indoor Wi-Fi coverage difficulties, and provide premium FTTR networks to users by building FTTR joint showcases, benchmark customer service centres, and joint marketing activities.

“We can also cooperate in win-win business models to make fibers a standard communication media for residential and commercial buildings,” said Zhishan.

Zhishan emphasized the importance of the industry to collaborate to improve the Wi-Fi experience. “In the pre-decoration field, we need to cooperate with the home decoration and real estate industries to promote the implementation of cabling standards, and work with operators to streamline NCE+app and interconnect with the OSS/BSS domain to build up service capabilities in planning, construction, acceptance, maintenance, and optimization that can be committed, sold, and monetized. In addition, operators need to offer proper packages, standardize fiber routing specifications as well as acceptance and O&M experience, provide installation incentives, and train marketing personnel on how to promote FTTR. Further, FTTR can help the CSPs in making a mark in the smart home field. The operators can build an integrated smart home solution and ecosystem.”

Huawei is looking forward to working with operators to explore more smart home services based on FTTR, such as smart home guarding, home TV, and service acceleration, to help operators achieve greater growth in home DICT services and shift from bandwidth monetization to experience monetization.

 

Mobile operator Vodafone has launched a Mobile Private Network (MPN) solution for businesses and other organisations, which supports the latest 5G Standalone (SA) technology. This means that those who deploy it should benefit from faster mobile broadband speeds, latency and more service customisation. Unlike most existing Non-Standalone (NSA) based 5G networks that rely on some […]

Broadband ISP RunFibre, which is rolling out a gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural areas of South Gloucestershire (England), has announced that they’ve just gone live in the village of Charfield West. But on the flip side, they’ve had to remove several villages from their plan due to competition. Firstly, the deployment to the […]

UK ISP Glide Group, which is currently extending their full fibre broadband network (leased lines and FTTP etc.) to serve more homes and businesses, has announced that they’ve completed a network upgrade of their London datacentre ring – pushing its capability to 9.6Tbps (Terabits) using Juniper PTX series routers. The provider currently has three datacentres […]

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The test was carried out with support from AT&T, Vodafone, and Rakuten Mobile in what the satellite operator claims to be an industry first

Today, US based AST SpaceMobile has announced the results of a successful test that saw it conduct the world’s first ever voice call over satellite using unmodified smartphones.

The call took place in Midland, Texas, over AT&T’s network, using AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 satellite to connect to the recipient on Rakuten Mobile’s network in Japan.

“Achieving what many once considered impossible, we have reached the most significant milestone to date in our quest to deliver global cellular broadband from space. While we take a moment to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment, we remain focused on the path ahead and pivotal next steps that get us closer to our goal of transforming the way the world connects,” said Abel Avellan, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AST SpaceMobile. “I am immensely proud of our team and our incredible partners, whose unwavering dedication and tireless efforts have brought us to this pivotal moment.”

Additional tests were also performed to verify the transfer of SIM information to BlueWalker 3, as well as to test the uplink and downlink rates of 4G and 5G signals.

The BlueWalker 3 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite itself was launched in September last year and serves as a protype for AST SpaceMobile’s planned commercial satellites, called BlueBirds. Ultimately, AST hopes to deliver direct-to-mobile satellite services to customers around the world using these BlueBirds and has already secured contracts with numerous operators to this effect.

AT&T itself partnered with AST in December last year, saying the planned satellite constellation would help boost the operator’s coverage across rural America.

For now, it is unclear whether access to the satellite for connectivity would be included in existing mobile packages or would come at an extra cost, with AT&T previously said it was “too early” to make such a decision.

The US telecoms space race appears to be well underway, with all three of the American wireless giants having already struck partnerships with LEO players.

For AT&T, their primary partner is UK-based LEO OneWeb, while rival T-Mobile is partnered with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use the Starlink satellite constellation. Both of these companies already have satellites in orbit; Starlink has around 4,000 satellites circling the Earth so far, while OneWeb is just one launch away from achieving the total number of devices it needs to provide global coverage.

Verizon, on the other hand, has a deal to use Amazon’s fledgling satellite programme, Project Kuiper, which is aiming to launch its first satellites into orbit in 2024.

How will satellite connectivity impact the US connectivity landscape? Join the experts in discussion at upcoming Connected American 2024 conference

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AST SpaceMobile, which is backed by Vodafone and several other global mobile network operators, has successfully completed the “first-ever two-way voice calls” between their prototype BlueWalker 3 satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and a regular 4G and 5G capable Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone on Earth. The announcement claims that this is “the first time […]

Network operator Freedom Fibre, which aims to cover over 2 million premises in England and Wales with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network – supported by UK ISP TalkTalk, has today added three new neighbouring towns along the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire and Merseyside to their rollout plan. The operator, which is being backed by a […]