SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite service, fresh from trialling a cheaper capped allowance package in France (here), has now begun offering another new service – initially only in the USA – to customers who are stuck on a waiting list. The catch is that you’ll have to accept a potentially substandard (“Best Efforts“) connection. Customers of […]

Some 11 homes along Heggatt Street in a rural Norfolk (England) community, outside Horstead, have been left without broadband access since 30th July, which began after unspecified damage was caused to Openreach’s (BT) network in the area. Some residents have been forced to drive out of the area just to find adequate connectivity. Openreach has […]

The Mobile UK trade body, which represents Three UK, EE (BT), O2 (VMO2) and Vodafone, has published a new report that highlight how mobile connectivity can help councils overcome the challenges of delivering adult social care. But it’s also pushing for rates relief and easier planning approvals on new masts etc. At present, all of […]

Broadband ISP and mobile giant Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) has today donated £2m to support the Good Things Foundation’s initiatives, which was setup in 2021 to help “disadvantaged people” across the UK get online and gain the digital skills they need. The move makes VMO2 a strategic partner for the group. The foundation does […]

Tell us about your startup
Weaver Labs is a Telecoms startup using blockchain technology to create a network of networks.

We build Cell-Stack, a software product to manage telecoms infrastructure to access it as a service. Simply put, what it does is: aggregates all the telecoms infrastructure that exists in a region in a shared pool of assets, it then opens it up to be consumed in an open marketplace. This software exists in the middle between those who supply telecoms connectivity and those who demand connectivity.

Through Cell-Stack, owners of networks can manage their cloud-based assets as a traditional orchestration tool, which cuts operational costs by acting as a single point of management. For those requiring connectivity, Cell-Stack is a portal where connectivity is offered and deals can be brokered. This “Network as a Service” portal abstracts all the complex elements of the network and instead offers a selection of open assets in the area.

We currently work with network infrastructure owners to help them set up their networks and use Cell-Stack as a management tool to provide connectivity services. We’re very focused on those who want to provide infrastructure as a service, from the public sector to the private sector. This includes local authorities building private networks or neutral host providers and systems integrators in the telecoms space.

What is your USP?
We address the market needs from multiple angles and try to solve the combined problem of telecoms infrastructure: how do we incentivise the community to build networks that allow to expand the technology in industries and cities?

By creating a sustainable model
This Incentivises new players to own infrastructure, reduce deployment & operational costs and monetize infrastructure assets that can be digitised in a single platform.
By diversifying the supply chain. Cell-Stack will be an open and shared marketplace between infrastructure owners, service providers and industries.
“Digitise, aggregate and accelerate” This software will publish, make easy to discover and integrate digital telecom assets to create connectivity, and make networks easy to consume, scale and commercialise.
By using a zero-trust approach to cybersecurity. Compliance-driven approach, driving security by design. We will be delivering connectivity networks based on monitoring, identity, network/device health and authorisation.

Some of the tangible benefits of Cell-Stack are:

As a consumer, you will access telecoms infrastructure to deploy digital services from providers who own or rent their networks.
As a service provider, you will rent telecoms infrastructure so that you don’t have to build your own, and you will have an easy-to-use management tool to organise your telecoms supply chain.
As a supplier, you will have an open platform to offer your telecom assets across all sectors.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
With the number of applications using the network increasing, Communications Service Providers are left with the burden of investing up to 70% of their revenues in deploying new infrastructure. This, alongside the uncertainty in the new business models for CSPs to capture revenues of the new private networks market makes it difficult to build a business case to unlock infrastructure investment. This impacts service provisioning, universal coverage and innovation in various sectors.

Our goal is to distribute the investment for new infrastructure across a larger number of players – not just the CSPs, and increase the number of infrastructure providers in the connectivity markets by facilitating integration of infrastructure owned by different players (i.e., public sector, neutral hosts, private networks). The marketplace aggregates network infrastructure both active (antennas, fibre optics, edge cloud servers) and passive (street furniture, ducting, masts), creating a more competitive, agile and dynamic pool of offerings to the CSPs that want to access the infrastructure as a service and provide network services on top infrastructure that is owned by other players.

In this platform, CSPs belong to a larger ecosystem of participants – we call this the collaborative economy, which favours CSPs by:

Reducing network ownership costs by collaborating: One network can serve multiple customers and can be built out of multiple contributions of digitised telecom assets
Foster “as a Service” commercial models: Making connectivity easy to consume, from a variety of players investing in Telecoms infrastructure
Easy for the market to capture value from connectivity: Open and exposed connectivity is easy to consume by customers, thus generating greater demand and acting as tool for innovation of new services such as AI, Robotics, Smart Devices, Manufacturing

How have you got to your current stage of development?
We’ve done some small rounds of investment but DCMS projects have been crucial to our development and success. The combination of investment with real-life project is key to innovating in the telco space.
Why did you establish the business?

We all come from very different backgrounds with different skill sets. That didn’t prevent us from working together in the 5G Tactile Internet Lab @ King’s College London, back in 2017. Maria was leading the team who delivered the first 5G Test Network in London, as part of a government funded trial where DCMS invested £16m to unlock the benefits of 5G. Anthony was the first hire for this project – Maria wanted to expand the knowledge of the Lab outside of “just Networking” looking at how the Telecoms sector was evolving, it was important to build strong software skills for this project. Together they built an amazing team of about 20 people, where James and Alex joined to work on the software team.
We spent long days and nights chatting about how software architectures were disrupting telco, we also talked a lot about blockchain, crypto and many other geeky stuff. Anthony, James and Alex come from the software and decentralized world, Maria very much telco, so we had a lot to learn from each other. While delivering the 5G project we could see how principles of decentralization could help solve scaling problems in Telecoms (this was back in 2018 – where Telecoms where still very monolithic and resistant to business model changes) and we embarked on a new adventure: we created Weaver Labs, to enable a more efficient use of the telecoms infrastructure by creating a decentralized network of telecoms assets. Our mission is to stimulate collaboration in the telecoms sector and make connectivity easy to consume

What does the future hold for your business?

Our ultimate vision is to create an open public decentralised network that serves as the engine of the marketplace of connectivity. This open public network creates a complete decoupling of infra ownership and service provisioning and breaks siloes of networks and knits together existing telecoms assets.

Our 10-15 year vision is that our Cell-Stack serves is a tool for:

Service providers sell connectivity services over a shared infrastructure model, driven by open architectures. We have contributed to reducing the dependencies of large corporates controlling the value chain.
Verticals, Public Sector (cities) and new connectivity users can scale fast, using Cell-Stack to build hyper-scalable networks, reducing the dependency on Service Providers to invest in infrastructure.

Our 15-20 year vision:

Weaver Labs has created and established a global Peer to Peer network with protocols that have democratised the access to connectivity, reducing barriers to entry to new players in the telecoms sector.
Weaver Labs has contributed to change the supply chain dynamics, removed barriers to infrastructure investment where the demand is met and there is a viable ROI to innovate and invest in new technologies.

HEADQUARTERS: London, United Kingdom
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 9 Full-time
LAST FUNDING TYPE: Seed
WEBSITE https://weaverlabs.io/
FOUNDERS
o Maria Lema
o James Arias
o Anthony Tsiopoulos
o Alex Roditis

You can meet Weaver Labs in the Startup Village at Connected Britain. To book your pass visit www.totaltele.com/connectedbritain

The post Startup Stories: benefitting from a network of networks first appeared on Total Telecom.

BT has reportedly launched a court case against Virgin Media (VMO2), which it is accusing of having migrated customers away from their EE based Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) platform (Virgin Mobile) before an agreement had been concluded. The broadband ISP and mobile giant is reportedly seeking £24.6m in compensation. Just for context. At the […]

Digital infrastructure operator CityFibre has restarted their deployments of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network across Blackpool and Preston in Lancashire (England), which comes after the company ended their local relationship with civil engineering partner Telent in July. Just to recap. The operator originally began their £60m rollout across the seaside town […]

NEWS

The duo say the successful pilot is the first step towards launching commercial slicing services, potentially offering customers a more personalised network experience

This week, Nokia and Safaricom are celebrating an African first with their successful trial of 4G/5G fixed wireless access (FWA) network slicing in Kenya’s Western Region.

The trial took place over a live network, including RAN, transport, and core infrastructure, and demonstrated successful slicing capabilities and continuity over 4G LTE, 5G non-standalone (NSA), and 5G standalone (SA) networks.

The live network featured Nokia’s AirScale 4G/5G base stations, as well as the vendor’s NetAct network management and assurance system and its FastMile 4G/5G customer premises equipment. The slicing functioned on

The trial was also noted as having been ‘multi-vendor’, though no specific additional vendors were named in the announcement itself.

Network slicing has long been touted as one of the crown jewels of the 5G era, potentially allowing operators the to construct virtual data pipelines for individual customers, optimised for their specific requirements.

“Network slicing enables operators the ability to divide a network into multiple virtual slices, which can be optimized for a specific target application or service. The end user of each network slice can then be serviced with different priorities, routing, levels of network performance, and security capabilities. Slices can be managed and deployed in minutes, and each one has key performance indicators used for service assurance,” explained Nokia in a press release.

For the most part, however, 5G slicing has remained out of reach for telcos; while technically possible in a limited form over 4G and 5G NSA, network slicing’s true capabilities can only be realised over 5G SA architecture, which has yet to be rolled out comprehensively in most markets.

For Safaricom, who only launched 5G services in Kenya in March last year, commercialising 5G network slicing will still be a long way off, but this trial nonetheless represents a promising step forward for the nascent technology.

“We are proud to have hosted Africa’s first successful pilot of 4G/5G FWA slicing on our network and looking forward to tailoring our service offerings to individual customers and industries, to meet their needs for high-speed connectivity precisely and without unnecessary cost,” said James Maitai, Network Director at Safaricom.

The operator’s interest in 5G network slicing is well founded. According to a recent study from ABI Research, the global 5G slicing revenue is expected to grow from $309 million in 2022 to around $24 billion by 2028. The report even suggested that 5G network slicing could replace a “a sizable part” of the private 5G market – another rapidly growing market segment for modern telcos – though warned that telcos’ commercial models may need to adapt to achieve maximum benefit.

“A sizable part of this market can be converted to 5G slicing. But first, the industry should address challenges associated with technology and commercial models. On the latter, consumers’ and enterprises’ appetite to pay premium connectivity prices for deterministic and tailored connectivity services remains to be determined,” said ABI’s 5G core and edge networks senior analyst, Don Alusha. “Furthermore, there are ongoing industry discussions on whether the value that comes from 5G slicing can exceed the cost required to put together the underlying slicing ecosystem.”

Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscribe to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here

Also in the news:
Singtel mulling the sale of cybersecurity firm Trustwave
CityFibre undergoes colourful rebrand
Vodafone offloads Hungarian unit for €1.8bn

The post Nokia and Safaricom laud Africa’s first FWA 5G slicing first appeared on Total Telecom.

News

The deal will see Nes provide Giganet with backhaul and data centre connectivity as the latter prepares its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) rollout to the South of England

Today, Dark Fibre player Neos Networks has announced a new partnership with Giganet, aiming to support the ISP’s burgeoning FTTP rollout with backhaul and data centre services.

Giganet currently offers customers access to its gigabit services through a variety of network providers, including Openreach and CityFibre, reaching millions of homes across the UK. In fact, earlier this year, Giganet announced that they had extended their partnership with CityFibre, thereby making their services available to customers across the entirety of CityFibre’s UK network.

However, last year Giganet announced they would also be rolling out their own FTTP network directly, investing £250 million to cover underserved areas of Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, and West Sussex.

In total, the company hopes to reach 300,000 premises with full fibre over the next four years, with its core network and first four exchange rings set to be live by the end of 2022.

As this new network grows, it will need additional backhaul capacity and support – something that Neos, with its 550 unbundled exchange network, is well positioned to provide.

“Neos Networks rose to the challenge of providing us with resilient and high capacity backhaul circuits across a wide range of exchanges as well as our core data centres,” explained Matthew Skipsey, Chief Technology Officer at Giganet. “Using Neos Networks, we have been able to secure connectivity to our points of presence faster than expected, initially enabling each of our first four regional rings with resilient 100Gb/s backhaul. This means our south coast roll-out is progressing at pace.”

This network expansion project will see Neos support Giganet to deliver a more than tenfold capacity increase.

“Both Neos Networks and Giganet have adopted a collaborative approach to this relationship. This has resulted not only in solutions being delivered faster than ever, as the Giganet network grows, it also gives us the ability to transition connectivity between points of presence without any disruption,” explained Sarah Mills, Chief Revenue Officer at Neos Networks. “There is no doubt that by working in partnership with alternative network providers, like Giganet, UK residents will benefit from a better, faster, and more resilient connectivity.”

Giganet’s Matthew Skipsey will be speaking on a panel focussing on enabling the creation of smart places at this year’s live Connected Britain conference. Check out the rest of the agenda here and join us live on September 20–21

Also in the news:
Singtel mulling the sale of cybersecurity firm Trustwave
CityFibre undergoes colourful rebrand
Vodafone offloads Hungarian unit for €1.8bn

The post Giganet teams up with Neos Networks to support new fibre rollout first appeared on Total Telecom.

News

The government deems no further action necessary after investigating Altice’s increased stake in BT on the grounds of national security

This week, the UK government has dropped its security probe into Altice UK’s increased stake in national operator BT, saying it will not force the company and its billionaire owner, Patrick Drahi, to reduce or sell its stake.

“BT Group has now been notified by the Secretary of State that no further action is to be taken under the Act in relation to the increase by Altice Europe N.V. of its shareholding in BT Group from 12.1% to 18%,” explained BT in a statement.

Drahi had first acquired a 12.1% stake in BT for £2 billion back in the summer of 2021, before further increasing this stake to 18% in December the same year.

At the time, Drahi had repeatedly asserted that his stake in BT was not a prelude to a full-blown takeover attempt, but this did not stem media speculation and BT quick set about shoring up its defences.

Altice’s next opportunity to increase its stake in BT was scheduled to take place in June this year, but process was suspended in May when the government announced that it would launch an investigation into Altice’s 6% stake increase on the grounds of national security.

The probe came as one of the first applications of the new National Security and Investment Act, which came into force in January 2022 and allows the Business Secretary to initiate investigations into any foreign investments they believed could present a risk to national security.

Now, with the probe concluded, Drahi will once again be free to increase his stake if he so chooses, with some analysts suggesting that a takeover could still be his long-term objective, despite his repeated denial.

“While he is not forced to reduce his stake, you cannot rule out moves to increase it further. Feels like the end game seems to be a takeover,” said Paolo Pescatore of analyst firm PP Foresight.

How would a takeover of BT by Altice affect the UK telecoms market? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Connected Britain conference

Also in the news:
Singtel mulling the sale of cybersecurity firm Trustwave
CityFibre undergoes colourful rebrand
Vodafone offloads Hungarian unit for €1.8bn

The post UK govt calls off probe into Altice’s stake in BT first appeared on Total Telecom.