Two UK home broadband ISPs – toob and Aquiss – have today separately announced that they’ve each managed to pass the milestone of 10,000 customers on their respective Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) packages and networks. First up, we have Shropshire-based internet provider Aquiss, which is a more traditional ISP that sells FTTP packages via Openreach’s national network. […]

A new Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, which was commissioned by Uswitch, has found that 25% of respondents “regularly fail” to receive the broadband internet speeds they pay for and 7% claim to never get the promised performance. But 42% also admit to not knowing what speed their package is supposed to deliver. Confusion […]

The post An Interview with Darren Woods, CFO, Freedom Fibre at Connected Britain 2022. first appeared on Total Telecom.

The post An Interview with Andy Marr and Alan Nunn, CGI at Connected Britain 2022 first appeared on Total Telecom.

NEWS

The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA)’s Private Mobile Networks Special Interest Group (SIG) will see its members collaborate to both track and accelerate the growth of the burgeoning private network ecosystem

The concept of private mobile networks is one of the hottest topics in the telecoms industry today, potentially presenting operators and vendors alike an attractive new revenue stream in the enterprise segment.

Indeed, for the past few years the deployment of these private networks has been accelerating rapidly. Earlier this year, a report from ABI Research forecast that the market for 5G private networks will reach $47.5 billion in 2030, up from $221 million in 2021, with LTE private networks similarly booming from $3.54 billion in 2021 to $66.88 billion in 2030.

The GSA too is tracking the surging interest in private networks, with their latest report suggesting that 66 mobile operators and 70 countries or territories globally are involved in private network projects, with 889 separate deployments recorded. The largest number of these deployments are taking place in the USA, with Germany, China, the UK, and Japan also major contributors.

Now, as the global private network ecosystem continues to expand, it should come as no surprise that interested parties are seeking to more detailed overview of deployment progress so far.

As such, today the GSA has announced the creation of its new private mobile networks SIG, an organisation aiming “to bring together leading telecommunications companies wishing to track, boost and promote the Private Mobile Networks ecosystem”.

The SIG will see its members share anonymised data related to their private network customers, allowing them each to gain a more holistic understanding of the wider ecosystem. The data will also be used to provide continuous tracking of the industry’s development, both for the participating members and also for the telecoms analyst community.

“The Private Mobile Network space is going from strength to strength and last year recorded 101% compound growth over the preceding 5 years, in terms of companies announcing Private Mobile Networks using 4G or 5G technology. The industry is now represented across 70 countries globally and customers continue to grow strongly,” said Joe Barrett, President of the GSA. “The GSA has a strong track record and experience in bringing together vendors, regulators and operators from across the 4G and 5G ecosystems to collaborate and promote technology adoption. The formation of the new Private Mobile Networks Special Interest Group (SIG) will bring this experience to the Private mobile networks space to accelerate its development worldwide.”

The SIG is backed by the usual suspects, with the world’s largest telecoms equipment vendors, Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei, all noted as founding members. Mavenir, Keysight Technologies, and Private5GandLTE are also listed as permanent members, with more vendors will be announced in the months to come.

What impact will private networks have on delivering Industry 4.0? Join the operators and their enterprise partners in discussion at this year’s live Total Telecom Congress

Also in the news:
Understanding the telco’s role in the IoT market
Startup Stories: A new approach to telecoms consultancy
MTN Group joins the Telecom Infra Project’s Board of Directors

The post Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei headline GSA’s new private networks group first appeared on Total Telecom.

techUK, an industry group for many of the UK’s key technology companies, has today published the outcome of their review into the progress that the Government have been making on rolling out both ultrafast 5G based mobile broadband and full fibre networks across the country. Needless to say, a few areas need improvement. The new […]

Infracapital-backed broadband ISP and network builder Ogi, which is investing £200m on their project to deploy a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across 150,000 premises in Wales by 2025, has started giving out small cash injections to help community groups across Pembrokeshire, Monmouthshire and the Vale of Glamorgan. The provider has already connected premises across a […]

Scotland-based business ISP Commsworld has entered into a new partnership with UK network operator Netomnia (ISP YouFibre), which aims to provide full fibre broadband connectivity to around 90,000 homes across North Lanarkshire over the next few years. The move seems intended to complement Commsworld’s existing agreement with the North Lanarkshire Council in Scotland, which in […]

Alternative network provider Netomnia – supported by UK broadband ISP YouFibre – has today announced the start of their full fibre rollout across five new locations including Tunbridge Wells (Kent), Burntwood (Staffordshire), Morriston and Neath (South Wales), and Livingston (West Lothian, Scotland). The operator, which has already covered 265,000 premises with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network […]

Interview

Ahead of Total Telecom Congress 2022, we spoke to Matt Hatton – Founding Partner at Transforma Insights to hear his take on the changing enterprise connectivity market.

From your perspective, how do telcos need to evolve to remain competitive in the modern connectivity ecosystem?

The key thing for telcos is knowing where they have the right to play themselves, where they need to harness third parties, and which bits of the market they should leave well alone. At Transforma Insights we focus a lot on the IoT market, and particularly the role of the telco in it. In IoT there’s a lot of price pressure (as there is everywhere!) to the point where we talk about $1 IoT, the idea that pretty soon there will be a big chunk of the cellular IoT market generating just $1 per year. How do telcos cope with that. Some would recommend a universal panacea of ‘moving up the stack’ and selling end-to-end solutions. After all, the actual applications accounts for 70-80% of the revenue in IoT, versus 5-10% (and shrinking) being connectivity. An obvious solution, and completely wrong. That bit of the market is fiercely contested with incumbent players with mature products, decades of experience and established channels to market. There are opportunities there, but only where the telco has carved out a ‘right to play’, which will apply in some cases, but certainly not all. Regarding harnessing third parties, we’ve recently completed some research on how telcos should work with the hyperscale cloud providers, rather than necessarily fearing them. The key is to put significant value-added wrappers around the core commoditised cloud computing functionality.

You’ll be chairing the Enabling Enterprise Track at Total Telecom Congress. There’s a lot of talk about the importance of private 5G for enterprise connectivity – how important will private 5G be?

We need to be a little careful not to get too carried away. It’s certainly the hottest part of enterprise 5G at the moment. But in our recent report on MPN, published just in October, we found that 80%+ of private networks are still 4G. We’re yet to see the use cases that will really use that extra functionality (and it’s good, particularly for reliability and low latency). It’s new, and it was always going to take time. The bottom line with MPN is that the functionality is great, but the networks and devices are typically an order of magnitude more expensive than alternatives, meaning that you’ve have to really value the additional security, coverage, reliability and so on. We’re expecting 22,000 MPNs deployed by 2030 so not insignificant.

Which other technologies are changing the game?

Edge computing, of all types from edge device to MEC, is clearly critical. The combination of that with AI means for a lot more automation of just about everything, particularly relevant to the IoT space which is our bread and butter. Throw in 5G and you have a combination of factors that will have a significant impact on how solutions are architected. There’s more intelligence and it needs to reside closer to the application. All of that combined is a bit of a game-changer.

What are you looking forward to at Total Telecom Congress next month?

I want to hear about how the roles in the ecosystem are changing. We have a hypothesis that with the evolution of cloud/edge, increased focus from telcos on IT services, the further separation of control layers from network infrastructure, virtualisation, open networks and a few other macro trends, that the old roles of organisations will change and that we need a new taxonomy for the organisations in the space. I’m looking for input on that.

Total Telecom Congress will be held on 1st and 2nd November at London’s Business Design Centre. The event will bring together over 1000 senior leaders from the global telecoms industry to discuss the key strategic priorities for telcos around the world. To join us in London next month, head to the event website to book your ticket.

The post Understanding the telco’s role in the IoT market first appeared on Total Telecom.