The government’s commitment to Open RAN has been growing steadily in recent years. The technology first appeared to come to their attention while the government was mulling whether to designate China’s Huawei a ‘high risk’ vendor and order its removal from UK networks back in early 2020. At the time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson notably called upon the telecoms industry to “tell us what the alternative is” and, since then, it appears that the answer has increasingly been ‘Open RAN&rsquo…
Rural ISP B4RN Raise 1Gbps Broadband Prices for First Time
Network builder and UK ISP B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), which has spent the past decade deploying a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural parts of England, has for the first time ever announced a price increase to their monthly rental. But they’ve also added a social tariff and cut setup fees. The […]
Ofcom Probes Shell Energy Over Missing End-of-Contract Letters
Energy provider and UK home broadband ISP Shell Energy are facing a new investigation by the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, after the provider indicated that it might not have sent the required end-of-contract and annual best tariff notifications to customers. The regulator’s End-of-Contract Notifications (ECN) system – as introduced in February 2020 – requires all […]
CoD Pushes TalkTalk Broadband Traffic to New 8.71 Tbps Record UPDATE
Internet traffic across UK broadband ISPs surged last night as people tuned in to stream the Champions League semi-final and to download the latest 40GB (GigaByte) ‘Season 3’ update for the popular ‘Call of Duty Warzone’ video game. As a result, TalkTalk set a new peak traffic record of 8.715Tbps (Terabits per second). The new […]
India now eying June for 5G auction
India’s first 5G spectrum auction has been delayed by over two years now, first impacted by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and since then by major disagreements between the Indian operators and regulatory bodies.
Since late 2021, it has been clear that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been aiming for the auction to finally take place in late 2022…
German regulator bans zero-rating mobile tariffs
Since 2015, the European Union has had legal protections in place supporting the concept of net neutrality, which guarantees users’ rights to access content on the internet without discrimination from the telecoms companies that operate the network. In short, net neutrality means that operators cannot restrict or throttle traffic to certain internet addresses or impose restrictions on certain types of traffic, with a few exceptions for legal and security reasons…
Enabling 5G at sea
Located along the southeast coast of China, Fujian Province sits along the coastline of over 3000 kilometers. Generations of Fujian people live in peace and contentment with its unique marine resources. With the continuous evolution of 5G technologies, ZTE and China Mobile Fujian Branch have recently jointly built a TDD+FDD two-layer three-dimensional continuous coverage network to help the marine economy set sail.
All-round Marine Communication Driven by Three-dimensional Coverage
ZTE has proposed the “three-network-in-one” three-dimensional coverage solution, that is, the combination of inshore network, ocean network, and ship network. This solution can meet the communication requirements of the entire sea area through technologies such as uplink and downlink carrier aggregation…
ISP Zen Internet Move to Tackle FTTP Broadband Speed Issues
Over the past few weeks a small number of Zen Internet’s UK broadband customers – primarily those on their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) packages – have reported a drop in speed, which in some cases has been significant. The issue seems to relate to a platform migration, but thankfully the ISP has now resolved “most” of it. […]
CityFibre to Start GBP17m FTTP Broadband Rollout in Kettering
CityFibre has today confirmed that they will invest £17 million to rollout a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the North Northamptonshire (England) town of Kettering, which is set to begin sometime in “early May” 2022. The local build, which is being supported by civil engineering contractor Granemore Group, is expected to begin […]
Understanding the technologies reshaping the subsea cable market
Ahead of Submarine Networks EMEA 2022 next month, Total Telecom sat down with Bertrand Clesca, Director of Client Solutions at Pioneer Consulting to hear his views on which technologies are shaping the submarine cable market and to learn about the projects that Pioneer Consulting is currently engaged with.
At Submarine Networks EMEA next month, you’ll be moderating a panel on “Innovations in subsea cable design.” In your view, what technologies are currently having the biggest impact on cable design?
Clearly, increased fiber pair count has the biggest technical and commercial impacts on subsea cable design. For many years, the number of fiber pairs has been limited to eight in repeatered cable systems. Four years ago, we saw the advent of the first cable systems with 12 fiber pairs…