News

The test saw drones travel between the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust sites in Coventry and Rugby, in preparation for medical deliveries

This week, BT has announced the latest steps in its ambition to help create the world’s largest drone superhighway, with a new trial seeing drones travel successfully between two Midlands hospitals.

The trial, jointly conducted by Skyfarer Ltd and Medical Logistics UK, was initiated in October 2022.

Using connectivity from BT’s network, the trial saw 130 drone flights conducted on the 32km route between the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust sites. This included travelling in complex airspace, close to urban areas.

Cumulatively, the drones in the trial travelled over 1,900km, including 220km in a single day. Over 30 hours of these flights were beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) – the first time BVLOS drone flight has taken place over-land in the UK.

As well as delivering the obvious benefits of being faster and more direct than comparable car travel between the two locations, drone deliveries will also bring major sustainability benefits; Skyfarer recorded the carbon emissions of a drone delivery as being 99.98% lower than a diesel van and 90.5% lower than an electric van.

“This trial would not have been possible without our consortium of partners. BT Group’s support has enabled a considerable amount of application learning and development, pushing Skyfarer and our consortium closer to a point where turn key long range BVLOS drone operations are an everyday occurrence,” said Georgia Hanrahan, Business Manager, Skyfarer.

“The Skyfarer and BT Group relationship will be the driving force for this revolutionary innovation and its adaption to day-to-day life. With BT Group providing the technology and communications expertise, Skyfarer is able to offer long-range BVLOS capability in return to justify and prove systems.”

BT has been increasing its activity in the drone space for a number of years now, viewing ubiquitous mobile connectivity as a cornerstone for BVLOS drone flight. In fact, last year, a consortium including the operator introduced “Project Skyway”, a plan to build a 165-mile drone corridor spanning Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby.

Since then, BT has expanded its relationship with the consortium’s leader, Unified Traffic Management (UTM) specialist Altitude Angel, by entering into a £5 million deal to help the Altitude Angel scale up its ARROW tower network beyond its initial goals outlined in Project Skyway.

According to BT, the opportunity here is enormous – in healthcare alone, the recent research suggests that commercialised drones could increase the GDP of the sector by £4 billion by 2030.

Perhaps it should comes as no surprise, then, that BT is not the only operator expanding its drone-related activities in recent years, with both Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom among the major telecoms players helping to develop this ecosystem.

How will mobile networks enable commercialised drone flight? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Connected North conference

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Contributed Article

For the first time since their inception over a century ago, America’s age-old copper and cable networks are being replaced with high-speed gigabit fiber optic networks in cities across the US

SiFi Networks, the pioneer of last mile open access fiber networks in the US is leading this charge and has produced a book: Broadband The Second American Revolution to back up its claim that its networks are the future of US broadband.

At a time when connectivity matters most, 42 million Americans still do not have access to wired or fixed wireless broadband. Where it is available, consumers often only have one choice of provider, and face the prospect of inflated prices and poor customer service.

SiFi Networks has explored this issue in a book titled Broadband: The Second American Revolution, which illustrates the shortcomings of the prevailing model of American broadband, where service providers own and operate their networks exclusively, instead of using a shared infrastructure as is common in most European and Asian countries.

As well as featuring interviews with leading US representatives, and the cities pioneering the next generation of broadband, the book explores three key issues: how to bring about better consumer choice, how to tackle the digital divide through better broadband and how to lay the connectivity groundwork for the smart cities of the future.

SiFi Networks is rolling out its privately funded open access networks in cities across the US which will enable selected ISPs to access new markets that were previously out of reach.

“Our city-wide fiber networks deliver wholesale access to service providers enabling them to quickly and profitably access new markets without any capital deployment” commented George Templeman, President, Networks Access Partnerships, SiFi Networks.

You can download SiFi’s book Broadband: The Second American Revolution by clicking on this link www.sifinetworks.com/futureofbroadband

SiFi Networks recently took part in Total Telecom’s first ever Connected America conference. Keep up to date with all of the latest Connected America news using the hashtag #ConnectedAmerica

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Press Release

The Orange Cyberdefense team says it will hire 800 cyber professionals in Europe to meet the growing cybersecurity threats to enterprises

Orange Cyberdefense, the Orange subsidiary and European leader in cybersecurity services, announces the launch of its latest recruitment campaign, which will run until the end of 2023. It aims to attract and recruit around 800 professionals in the 9 European countries where it operates to meet the new cybersecurity challenges of companies of all sizes, and who will join the 3,000 experts already in the organization.

Positions are available across the entire organization, from analyst roles in operational teams to architects, engineers, consultants, and even ethical hackers.

From beginners to experts (master’s level, engineering or business schools, universities, training in new technologies and/or IT, work-study programs, etc.), roles are available to those who want to work in the fast-paced and mission critical cybersecurity space, on topics ranging from anticipating, identifying, protecting, detecting, and responding to cyber threats.

Building a community of experts to support the organization’s strong growth

Orange Cyberdefense ended the last financial year with overall growth of 14% across its activities, achieving sales of €977 million. More generally, its revenues have increased fivefold over the past 8 years.

To support its development ambitions, it has increased its acquisitions in Europe, integrating 4 new companies in 4 years. The goal of rapid expansion can be seen in the organization’s desire to be one of the most dynamic employers in its market each year, with an average growth of 13% in its headcount in the last 2 years. Last year it hired 777 new experts.

A single, global recruitment platform for applicants across 9 European countries

In a context where talent is scarce and customer demand is high, Orange Cyberdefense is making significant changes to improve its recruitment credentials. To attract new professionals from all backgrounds, it has created a single recruitment platform for all its cyber campuses in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, and is implementing measures to enrich professional and personal paths by simultaneously strengthening the gateways between the various jobs and the opportunities to identify the nature of the cyber threat as close as possible to its customers.

These actions, aimed at considerably diversifying the profiles of its employees, are reflected both in the average age of its employees (which is 35 years old), and in proportion of women in the organization (approximately 20%), and who represent 25% of new hires. Orange Cyberdefense is also committed to increasing diversity within tech jobs. As such, it is a member of the Women4Cyber association, which promotes cybersecurity jobs to women through mentoring and tutoring sessions.

“Our goal is to create the largest community of cyber experts in Europe. This is a huge challenge, especially with the talent shortage the whole industry is experiencing. We promise the professionals who choose to join us that they will be joining a very ambitious organization that has the resources to be the leader in its market and to offer extensive development opportunities to its employees. Our employees are united by a common mission to build a safer digital society. We have entered an ultra-digital world with many clear benefits – let’s not deny ourselves this – but we must not forget the real dangers it also poses,” said Hugues Foulon, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense.

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Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
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Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

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