News

News The Asia Direct Cable (ADC) spans approximately 10,000km, connecting China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam Today, Japanese tech giant NEC Corporation has announced the activation of the long-awaited ADC submarine cable system. The cable, which connects China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, has a capacity of over 160 Tbps and represents a significant boost to data traffic route diversity in the region. “This new cable marks a significant...

  PRESS RELEASE Independent Power Transmission Operator and Serverfarm Join Forces to Spearhead Hyperscale Data Center Development and Operations in Greece    Athens, 16th December 2024 The Independent Power Transmission Operator (IPTO) of Greece and Serverfarm, a global data center developer and operator, announced today the signing of a Heads of Agreement regarding the formation of Gemini, a Joint Venture with the objective of developing and operating state-of-the-art, hyperscale-ready data...

Customers of Sky’s broadband-based Sky Glass and Sky Stream pay TV streaming devices have finally got access to the provider’s new Ad-Skipping feature, which is an add-on pack that appears to have been introduced alongside Sky’s latest firmware update (e.g. QS34.022.00P on Sky Glass). The new update, which started to be rolled out last week, also included various other bug fixes and feature additions (e.g. a new Extra-vivid viewing mode and various tweaks to the User Interface). But the...

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has just announced the second batch of annual price increases for 2024 (see first batch), albeit this time focused more on their wholesale Ethernet (EAD, EBD etc.), OSA, Excess Construction Charges (ECC), SOTAP for Analogue, Dark Fibre and Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) products for UK ISPs, businesses and other networks. Just to recap. Ofcom’s regulation (example) allows Openreach to increase prices across their various wholesale products, usually...

The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) has today dismissed a £1.3bn class action claim by the Collective Action on Land Lines (CALL) campaign against national broadband ISP and phone provider BT, which alleged that the UK telecoms giant had overcharged 2.3 million of its landline-only phone customers between 2015 and 2018. Just to recap. The original claim was first raised at the start of 2021 through UK law firm Mishcon de Reya, which was acting on behalf of a former Ofcom telecoms consultant...

Contributed Article by Marc Anné, Chair of Judges for the World Communication Awards This year, we counted 219 entries across 23 award categories in the World Communication Awards. As expected, the newly introduced AI Excellence Award became a popular category. 2023 saw the rise of generative AI, 2024 proved to be the year of its integration into telecommunications. Entries showcased incredible innovation and excellence and reflected a wide variety of use cases whereby Gen-AI is generating...

Network operator CityFibre has today announced that they’ve begun the roll-out phase of their £77m state-aid supported Project Gigabit contract for the Leicestershire and Warwickshire (Lot 11) area. This will extend their 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband network to an additional 45,000 hard-to-reach rural premises in those regions. Curiously, the figures given in Cityfibre’s announcement today differ from those they gave when the contract was announced in February 2024 (here), which specified a...

Rural ISP Wessex Internet has announced that they’ve connected their first customer to a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which they’ve been building as part of their £18.8m Project Gigabit (Lot 30) contract for South Wiltshire (England). This aims to cover “around” 14,500 hard-to-reach premises in the area. Zoe Hallett from Bapton is the first to benefit, although the roll-out will see the provider expanding their existing full fibre network across more of...

Abingdon-based rural ISP and full fibre network builder Gigaclear, which has already extended their FTTP network to cover 580,000 premises (RFS) in England and signed-up over 130,000 customers, has today announced that they’ve appointed Andy Matthews to be their new Chairman – replacing Stephen Nelson who is retiring. Andy is currently the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of infrastructure investment firm Infracapital, which backs Gigaclear, and has been on the provider’s Board since 2019. Andy...

Some of TalkTalk’s broadband customers have, over the past week or two, been experiencing an unusual router bug with the provider’s ‘Wi-Fi Hub’ device that has been causing them to be repeatedly disconnected from the internet. But the ISP is currently known to be “in the process of applying a solution to all impacted” routers. The issue appears to have started on Monday (9th Dec) last week for some customers, although others only began to notice it at the start of this week (examples here and...