News

The Comms Council UK, which represents the United Kingdom’s national Unified Communications and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) phone industry, has today announced that they’ve appointed new Chair, Tracey Wright, to replace Eli Katz, who, after 20 long years of service, stepped down as Chair on the 6th of January 2025. Tracey has been selected by CCUK’s Council in light of her past contributions to the association and industry. These include leading CCUK’s Industry Developments Working...

Little-known fixed wireless ISP Kijoma Broadband (Kijoma Solutions), which generally covers rural parts of West Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire in England, appears to have vanished (including email and website) after appearing to suffer a service outage that started just before 9am yesterday morning. Firstly, there’s a good chance that many of our current readers might never have heard of Kijoma, which wouldn’t be surprising as the last time we had anything to report on them was a decade ago. But...

Customers of budget internet provider TalkTalk, specifically those who take their Pay TV service, have had it confirmed that the ISP will be phasing out their single billing integration of Sky’s NOW TV streaming service (i.e. customers will no longer be able to add NOW TV Plans to a single bill from the ISP). Netflix integration was also removed last month. The change was first spotted earlier last month after several of the ISP’s customers noticed (community forum) that they could no longer...

News Conservative MP John Hayes has asked Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds to refer the enquiry to the newly appointed Covid corruption commissioner Back in December, a group of franchisee’s running Vodafone’s high street shops in the UK filed a court case against the operator, claiming the company had “unjustly enriched” itself at their expense. The case itself primarily revolves around cuts to commission Vodafone introduced in 2020, during the height of the coronavirus crisis. At this...

News  The funding aims to close the digital divide, giving rural residents the same opportunities as urban areas  The UK government has announced the latest tranche of Project Gigabit funding, with £289 million in contracts being won by Openreach to bring high-speed broadband to some of Britain’s most isolated areas under the ongoing Project Gigabit.  The four contracts targets areas including the Dee Valley, the Isle of Anglesey, Shropshire Hills, and regions in North and Southwest Wales,...

News   Italy is in advanced negotiations with SpaceX for a €1.5 billion ($1.55 billion) contract to enhance the country’s telecoms security, according to media reports  The proposed five-year deal will focus on implementing encrypted government communications, enhancing military operations in the Mediterranean, and providing satellite services for emergency responses to natural disasters or security threats.  As part of the deal, SpaceX’s Starlink system will be deployed to boost connectivity...

Press Release Brightspeed, one of the nation’s largest fiber broadband builders focused on empowering more homes with ultrafast, reliable internet, today announced its multi-gig-speed network has passed approximately 1.82 million locations — surpassing its year-end goal of 1.75 million fiber-enabled premises across its 20-state footprint. The company rolled out more than 17,600 miles of fiber cable in 2024 bringing the total fiber deployed since the build launch to more than 103,000 miles....

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today revealed that broadband usage across their UK network increased by 10.5% in 2024 (higher than the c.9% recorded for 2023 and 2.5% in 2022) to total 103,590 PetaBytes (PB) of data, with December 2024 being the “busiest month of the year for broadband traffic” (1st Dec 2024 was the busiest day). The operator typically supplies numerous broadband ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk, BT, Sky Broadband and hundreds more) across the country and as such their platform...

Press Release A ten-fold increase in customers in the space of a year has led Red Helix, a market leader in cyber security and network performance, to invest £1million in expanding the capacity of its UK-based 24/7 security operations centre (SOC), increasing headcount by 150%. The company expects its SOC team to grow further in 2025, as demand for its specialised cyber services continues to soar. Despite the global cyber skills shortage, Red Helix has been successful in recruiting and...

News The hyperscaler continues to double down on AI infrastructure while also making overtures to the incoming Trump administration to keep regulation to a minimum In a blog post titled on Friday titled ‘The Golden Opportunity for American, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith confirmed that the company is “on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters” in 2025. These data centres, Smith says, will be crucial to training new and more sophisticated AI...