Rural broadband ISP Wessex Internet, which is building a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across parts of Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Somerset in England, has today announced that they’ve secured a “major equity investment” from abrdn’s Core Infrastructure team to “accelerate” their rollout. The provider has recently been making good progress on their commercial builds, […]

Macquarie Capital-backed UK ISP Voneus, which holds a “near term” plan to cover 100,000 homes in rural areas with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network (here), has today appointed the ex-commercial director at BT Enterprise, Francesca Lee, to be their new Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). The new appointment is part of Voneus’ plan to more than […]

NEWS

There’s not much positive press for Liz Truss at the moment, but one change from the UK Prime Minister which is likely to be better received is a review of Britain’s visa system which could benefit the telecom sector.

The government is set to review the “shortage occupation list” which will enable certain industries  more freedom to employ staff from overseas – including, as widely reported, broadband engineers.

The changes would mean a relaxation of requirements around speaking English and simplified entry for migrants from outside the EU with lower visa fees and no employer requirement to prove that there is no suitable local worker for the role.

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) welcomed the review saying “Guarding against skills and labour shortages can simultaneously help keep inflation in check while ensuring firms have the people they need to grow, benefiting everyone.”

The Times newspaper reported Truss specifically mentioning the need to recruit broadband engineers from abroad so they can help fulfil a Government promise to ensure 85% of homes have access to full-fibre broadband.

The telecom sector has long recognised it’s skills shortage with various initiatives undertaken to try to address the situation, including Telcom Group and their Telecoms Engineer Bootcamp, whilst the subject was discussed by a panel featuring altnets including CityFibre, Full Fibre and Zzoomm at last weeks Connected Britain.

James Fredrickson, Policy Director at Hyperoptic, is quoted by ISPReview as having said “It’s great to see progress being made on this issue – this will be a big help in securing the skilled labour needed to accelerate full fibre rollout. We will continue to work with the Home Office to maximise the impact of this.”

The post Telecoms could benefit from changes to shortage occupations list first appeared on Total Telecom.

News

Ooredoo Group becomes the latest telco to announce its plans to sell its tower portfolio.

Ooredoo Group has confirmed that it is preparing to sell approximately 20,000 of its towers. In a statement released on Monday, the Qatar-based company announced the move as part of its shift to an “asset-light model”.

The company’s strategy seeks to maximise value from its infrastructure and generate more value for customers and shareholders alike.

Ooredoo Group’s portfolio consists of 20,000 towers across the different markets where the company operates.

With this latest announcement from Ooredoo, the trend of telcos offloading their tower assets continues. Last month saw reports of a bidding war in Brazil with TowerCo’s lining up to bid for OI’s towers. In the Philippines, Globe also secured deals worth $1.28 billion for the sale of 5,700 towers.

The post Ooredoo prepares to offload tower portfolio first appeared on Total Telecom.

Press release

abrdn’s Core Infrastructure team has agreed to make a major equity investment in Wessex Internet. The investment will help to accelerate the deployment of Wessex Internet’s full fibre-to-the-home network across rural parts of the South West of England. In establishing the agreement, abrdn will work together with Wessex Internet’s founders to support their vision for the future growth of the business.

Wessex Internet is a full fibre operator in the South West of England, having built an impressive fibre footprint across Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset. The business has a network footprint covering tens of thousands of homes across these counties and has secured significant contracts underpinning a business plan that targets an additional 150,000 premises by 2027, through a combination of subsidised and unsubsidised capital investment. Notably, at the end of August 2022, the UK Government announced that Wessex Internet had been awarded the first subsidy contract under their new £5bn Project Gigabit broadband scheme, which will reach 7,100 premises in rural parts of North Dorset.

This is the first investment funded by abrdn’s third Core Infrastructure Fund, ASCI III, which is raising a target €1 billion to invest in the Pan-European infrastructure mid-market, and follows on from the final investment in abrdn’s second Core Infrastructure Fund, SLCI II, which invested in the German train rolling stock sector.

Dominic Helmsley, Head of abrdn Core Infrastructure, said: “We are committed to delivering reliable and essential infrastructure to local communities. This investment is our second UK rural fibre investment and underpins our core capabilities and ambitions in real assets.”

Alex Anderson, Investment Director, abrdn Core Infrastructure, added: “We look forward to working alongside Wessex Internet’s founders and management team, leveraging our capabilities and experience in the infrastructure sector to deliver this next phase of growth to the benefit of a number of historically underserved rural parts of the country. This kind of investment is crucial to allowing the supply of ultrafast, reliable and cost-effective broadband in rural areas to help drive productivity, connect communities and reduce the digital divide across the UK”.

Hector Gibson Fleming, Chief Executive Officer at Wessex Internet, commented: “Wessex Internet is a local Dorset company; our fantastic team has already built a track record of delivering outstanding products and exceptional service through our collaborative approach to full fibre rollout into underserved rural communities.  This investment from abrdn is a demonstration of the success of our differentiated strategy. As we accelerate our rollout, we will fulfil our vision of connecting the rest of the communities within our region, creating a truly local broadband operator with a trusted brand that fully understands its customer base. We are hugely excited about working with the abrdn Core Infrastructure investment team to build on our reputation as we enter this next phase of growth”.

The post abrdn invests in Dorset-based Wessex Internet first appeared on Total Telecom.

STARTUP STORIES

Tell us about your start up
AppSec Phoenix is a next-gen ASOC correlating Application Security and Cloud Security with a product risk and impact view. We help CISOs and Executives set risk-based targets that translate to task for engineers. With our ARCTIQ technology and graph, we help teams correlate and visualize the next vulnerability that will hurt them.

We serve mid-size and enterprise customers across the world, but currently focus primarily in Europe and the Americas.

What is your USP?
ACT On risk – Actionale Contextualized Threat – We translate vulnerability into risk into actions for engineers based on the risk appetite from the business.

Appsec Phoenix enables security teams to scale, removing the manual triaging and offering a consistent approach on vulnerabilities across cloud, application security, vulnerability management.

Appsec Phoenix prioritize vulnerabilities based on contextual aspect, Cyber Threat Intel, business criticality and delivers a risk based view of the vulnerabilities .

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
Telco’s can act as clients when they want to visualize the risk across their estate and they can also offer Managed Service Providers Solutions when managing vulnerabilities or pen testing.

How have you got to your current stage of development?
Appsec Phoenix was boostrapped and admitted in Plexar DCMS, Primarily through self-started passion, extensive experience and network in the industry, and with the help of angel investors.

Why did you establish the business?
The founders have extensive experience as security practitioners. The project was born from the struggles and learnings within large enterprise organisations in the telco (Vodafone) and banking (HSBC) sectors.

What does the future hold for your business
We are working on graph visualization, pipeline integration and expansion

COMPANY CV
HEADQUARTERS: London, UK
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 10-20
LAST FUNDING TYPE: Seed
URL: https://appsecphoenix.com/
FOUNDERS:
Francesco Cipollone
Alfonso Eusebio

You can meet AppSec Phoenix at the Total Telecom Congress in London on the 1-2 November 2022. To book your ticket CLICK HERE
There are still limited Startup Village slots available – to confirm yours email Will Everill

The post Startup Stories: prioritising the vulnerabilities that will hurt you most first appeared on Total Telecom.

A new business grant scheme, which has injected just under £1.4 million into the local Cambridgeshire and Peterborough economy in England, has already helped local firms to create 42 new-to-the-firm products and enabled 32 businesses to access faster broadband speeds in excess of 30Mbps. The scheme itself (‘Digital Technology Grants for Business‘), which has now […]

VIEWPOINT

Everyone seems to know about 5G, no matter how technology unsavvy they are. It’s clear that 5G is not just another generation of mobile technology – it has captured the public’s imagination because of its potential to change industries, businesses and the very way we interact with digital content.

However, 5G comes with a few strings attached, and they are mostly of the fibre kind.

The 5G experience — whether in the home, office or on the go — can only be achieved through fibre access networks. Fibre and 5G are not competing; they complement each other. Fibre makes 5G faster and cheaper to deploy, while 5G extends fibre coverage and brings mobility, which wired technology cannot offer. Together, they can achieve more than each can alone. So, if you ask operators what the core of their strategy is today, they will say 5G and fibre.

These days, fibre broadband is pretty much everywhere, passing every street and every building in towns and cities, stretching into villages, and across great parts of the countryside. In parallel, fibre technology has evolved to be faster, more agile, more reliable and greener. These two factors – the ubiquitous presence of fibre and the technology advances – have created a shift in the industry. It is no longer about fibre-to-the-home; it is fibre-for-everything. Fibre can now connect consumers, businesses, industry 4.0, smart cities – and yes, also 5G sites.

One of the key considerations for 5G deployments is mobile transport, the part of the network that carries traffic from mobile sites deeper into the network. This is even more important as 5G starts to densify and new cell sites need to be deployed, each of which requires a transport route. Fibre broadband networks already exist in these locations, so leveraging these networks is the most efficient way to provide mobile transport. It reduces costs and power consumption by half.

Similar synergies can be found everywhere. Industry 4.0 has brought a wave of value-add applications that depend on high-speed connectivity. Many new applications are based on a large number of HD images that are sent to the cloud for analysis and real-time feedback, and that requires high-speed and low-latency connectivity. Quality control, packaging and storing, inventory management, video surveillance, security and machine automation are just a few of the examples.

In many scenarios involving fixed machinery and equipment, fibre broadband provides the fastest and greenest connectivity to and within enterprises, making 5G and fibre the perfect mix for Industry 4.0. The same goes for smart cities and consumer broadband.

Fibre is truly an exciting technology. Of all the broadband technologies, it is the fastest, the greenest, and it lasts forever. Today, 25 Gb/s Passive Optical Networks (PON) are already in the field, 50 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s are on the horizon. Fibre PON networks are six to eight times more power efficient than other access technologies, so the more users and services that are connected to fibre, the better it is for energy bills and our carbon footprint.

With sub-millisecond latency, mission critical reliability, intelligence for slicing and zero-touch automation, fibre is the perfect companion to 5G for a better and greener connected world.

This article was written by Ana Pesovic, Marketing Director, Fixed Networks Nokia

The post The two Fs you want on your report card: Fibre and 5G first appeared on Total Telecom.

PRESS RELEASE

Neos Networks, one of the UK’s leading business connectivity providers, is to provide vital communications links between the Viking Energy Wind Farm, being constructed in Mainland Shetland, and the headquarters of SSE Renewables, in Perth in the Scottish mainland, more than 300 miles away.

Starting its construction in 2020, the Viking Energy Wind Farm is one of the largest projects of its type in the UK. When fully operational, it will also be one of the UK’s most productive wind farms, capable of providing energy for nearly half-a-million homes.

Neos have been appointed by SSE Renewables to support the project with the provision and delivery of a machine-to-machine (M2M) network – which will enable the energy provider to control and monitor the performance of the 103 wind turbines remotely – and provide links back from Shetland to SSE’s headquarters in Perth.

“With any new facility of this size, scope and importance, deploying and provisioning first class communications links are critical to its operational performance,” said Andy Ainsley, Head of Energy and Utilities at Neos Networks. “We’re delighted to have been entrusted with this vital element of the project.”

The Viking Energy Wind Farm site in Shetland is wholly owned by SSE Renewables and construction is expected to be complete in 2024. The wind farm will not only provide a reliable, renewable, energy source for the island’s 23,000-strong population, it will also power homes across the UK and is expected to generate £2.2m annually in community benefit revenue for the islands for its expected 25-year operational lifetime.

Derek Hastings, SSE Renewables’ Head of Onshore Projects, said; “We’re pleased to be working with Neos to deliver the communications links we will need to ensure the efficient operation of Viking Energy Wind Farm. The solution Neos is providing will allow us to share and monitor local wind farm performance data in real time with SSE’s world-class Renewable Operations Centre in Perth, once the wind farm enters commercial operation. This will be crucial in helping ensure that Viking, as the UK’s most productive onshore wind farm, operates at maximum efficiency to deliver homegrown renewable energy to consumers in Shetland and the wider UK.”

The provision of connectivity infrastructure, in tandem, of an undersea 600-megawatt high voltage power cable is vital to delivering the project, enabling the islands to generate wind power for the rest of the United Kingdom. As well as creating around 300 jobs during its construction, the completed project will also diversify the local economy and introduce around 35 permanent employment positions and apprenticeships in the islands.

The communications links are vital for the efficient running of the wind turbines. Performance data can be monitored locally and back at SSE Renewables headquarters to ensure the farm is operating at maximum efficiency, with the M2M comms across the entire site also highlighting any potential issues and enabling preventative maintenance.

Neos Networks are a Gold Sponsor of the Connected North event, organised by Total Telecom. Find out how you can join them in Manchester on the 17-18 April 2023 HERE

The post Neos Networks connects Viking Energy Wind Farm to SSE Renewables HQ first appeared on Total Telecom.

SpaceX’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based mega constellation of Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites has made a small but significant improvement to its coverage of the UK, which for the first time has now started to encompass the southern part of the remote Shetland Islands in Scotland. Back in late July 2022 we reported that Starlink’s […]