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…
Orange, Másmovíl make €19bn merger official
This weekend, Orange and Másmovíl have announced that they are officially moving forward with their planned merger to create a 50:50 joint venture in Spain.
The deal values Orange Spain was valued at €7.8 billion and Másmovíl at €10.9 billion, giving the combined entity a market value of €18.6 billion.
The combined, converged operator would have roughly 7.1 million fixed line customers and 20.2 million mobile subscribers…
CityFibre Upgrade UK Network to 10Gbps Full Fibre Broadband
Network builder CityFibre has today announced that they will begin upgrading their national UK GPON based full fibre broadband ISP network to harness XGS-PON technology from April 2023, which will enable them to offer symmetrical download and upload speeds of up to 10Gbps – Gigabits per second (9.953Gbps to be exact). Just to recap. CityFibre […]
G.Network to Rollout Full Fibre Across Social Housing in Hackney
London-focused gigabit-broadband ISP G.Network has signed a “City Wide Wayleave” (legal land access) agreement with the Hackney Council in London, which will see them build their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover public housing in the borough. The operator currently claims to cover around 400,000 premises in the capital (up from 300k in Jan 2022) […]
British Satellite Broadband Operator OneWeb Set for Eutelsat Merger
Satellite broadband firm OneWeb, which is British-registered and partly owned by the UK Government, is reportedly about to sign a merger deal with existing investor and rival French operator Eutelsat. But the UK is understood to have secured a number of concessions to help protect its strategic investment. So far, OneWeb has already managed to […]
Vodafone UK Sees 1.07 Million Customers Take Fixed Broadband
Vodafone UK has just published their latest Q1 FY23 results, which reveals that their fixed broadband base grew again to total 1,072,000 customers (up by 22k in the quarter vs 59k in Q4 FY22) and their mobile base also increased to total 17.22m (up by 115k vs 51k in the previous quarter). In terms of […]
CityFibre Find Positives in its Failed FTTP Prices Appeal vs Ofcom
The Competition Appeal Tribunal‘s (CAT) decision last week to reject CityFibre’s appeal against Ofcom’s approval process for Openreach’s “Equinox” price cut (here), which slashed the cost of the incumbent’s wholesale FTTP broadband products for UK ISPs, may not have been a total loss for the alternative network operator. Alternative network providers, like CityFibre, are concerned […]
Hull UK ISP KCOM to Start Migrating DSL Broadband Lines to FTTP
Hull-based broadband ISP KCOM has, thus far, been fairly quiet on the operator’s plans to withdraw their older copper-based broadband (ADSL and VDSL) and phone (PSTN) products. But a recent update, which was given to their wholesale customers, appears to have included a solid indication of the likely timeline. The migration plan is only relevant […]
Newly formed Seren calls on NEC for help with JUNO cable
NEC Corporation has announced that it has been contracted by Seren Juno Network Co., Ltd., a company established by NTT Ltd Japan Corporation, PC Landing Corp. Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and JA Mitsui Leasing, Ltd. to build a trans-Pacific subsea fiber-optic cable, “JUNO Cable System,” connecting California in the US with Chiba prefecture and Mie prefecture in Japan…
Rakuten Symphony opens Global Innovation Lab in India
Rakuten Symphony, Inc., a global leader in cloud-native, Open RAN telco infrastructure platforms, services and solutions, today unveiled plans to establish a new lab in Bengaluru. The Global Innovation Lab is expected to open in early 2023 and will be housed inside new engineering development facilities opening simultaneously to bring together Rakuten Symphony’s Bengaluru employee base.
Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer of Rakuten Symphony…