Infracapital-backed rural broadband ISP Gigaclear is reportedly working with bankers at Rothschild to raise up to £300m of additional capital to help fuel their ongoing rollout of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) infrastructure, which has so far covered 300,000 premises (up from 250,000 in December 2021). The operator’s full fibre network is already present in rural villages […]
Broadband and Phone Price Hikes for UK Shell Energy ISP Users
Most of Shell Energy’s broadband and phone customers in the UK have been informed that the ISP will hike their prices by an average of 6.1% a month from 1st September 2022. But those who joined or renewed on or after 9th January 2022 will escape the hike, which is at least mercifully below the […]
TalkTalk Trial Free Automatic UK Upgrades to FTTP Broadband UPDATE
Budget conscious UK ISP TalkTalk appears to have begun a new programme trial, which is giving “some” existing customers a free automatic upgrade to full fibre broadband – provided they don’t already have such a package and are covered by the new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. At present TalkTalk’s platform supports several full fibre networks from […]
Government Offer £25m to Help Develop Future 6G UK Mobile Kit
The UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has today set aside £25m as part of their new Future Open Networks Research Challenge (FONRC) fund to help support the development of future 5G and 6G based mobile broadband equipment (focused primarily on O-RAN). The goal of this fund is to enable academics […]
Virgin Media O2 Donate Another 15 Million GigaBytes to National Databank
Broadband and mobile giant Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) have agreed to supply a further 15 million GigaBytes (GB) of free data to the Good Things Foundation’s National Databank, which gifts free mobile broadband data to community groups and the people they support to aid internet connectivity – either via SIM cards or vouchers. The […]
UK Ranks 59th in the World for the Price of 1GB Mobile Data
New research has analysed 5,292 mobile data (mobile broadband) plans from across 233 countries in order to compare the cost of a 1GB (GigaByte) data allowance, which found that the United Kingdom has improved its rank from 78th in 2021 to 59th in 2022, with an average price of USD $0.79 per GB (down from […]
Telefonica sells €1bn stake in rural fibre network
Telefónica Group, one of the greatest telecommunications services operators at a global scale, and the consortium Crédit Agricole Assurances (“CAA”), the first bank insurance Group in Europe, and Vauban Infrastructure Partners (“Vauban”), a leading long-term infrastructure investor, have reached an agreement to set up Bluevia Fibra, S.L. (“Bluevia”), a unique platform for the commercialization and deployment of a fibre network (FTTH) in Spain, mainly in rural areas and with limited overlap with other networks.
The consortium formed by CAA/Vauban will acquire a 45% stake in Bluevia from Telefónica España through an upfront consideration of &euro…
OneWeb and Eutelsat eyeing merger
This week, French satellite firm Eutelsat has announced that it is in merger discussions with the UK’s OneWeb, seeking to combine the pair’s respective geostationary (GEO) and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
The discussions suggest that the newly created business would be owned 50:50 by the companies’ respective shareholders, creating a combined entity with the scale to take on the likes of Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation.
OneWeb currently has 428 LEO satellites in orbit, with the goal of launching 648 in total to ensure global coverage. Eutelsat…
Nokia and CityFibre sign 10-year deal to build 10Gbps broadband network
CityFibre is building an open access network which will connect up to 8 million premises in 285 cities, towns and villages, reaching a third of the country. The Lightspan access nodes being supplied by Nokia as part of this solution will be used by CityFibre to offer its wholesale customers multigig residential broadband (up to 10Gb/s in both directions) and higher bandwidth services such as connecting Enterprises and providing backhaul for mobile networks…
Nokia and CityFibre sign 10 year agreement to build 10Gb/second UK broadband network
CityFibre is building an open access network which will connect up to 8 million premises in 285 cities, towns and villages, reaching a third of the country. The Lightspan access nodes being supplied by Nokia as part of this solution will be used by CityFibre to offer its wholesale customers multigig residential broadband (up to 10Gb/s in both directions) and higher bandwidth services such as connecting Enterprises and providing backhaul for mobile networks…