News

London-based alternative broadband ISP Pulse Fibre, which over the next few years aspires to complete over 250,000 unique UK “full fibre” (FTTP) connections into new build homes and MDUs (here), has today announced that holders of the Blue Light Card (i.e. price cuts for workers in the emergency services and veterans) will be able to get a special discount. Essentially, Pulse Fibre have launched a new tariff (Blue Light Discount) for holders of the card. Eligible customers will now be able to...

Network operator CityFibre, which has so far extended their 2.5Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to cover around 4 million UK premises, have today confirmed the completion of their “primary” £21m build in the large port town of Hartlepool in County Durham (England). The original network deployment, which began with the help of civil engineering contractor Granemore Group, first entered the construction phase around September 2022 (here) and was due to complete by...

Internet benchmarking firm Ookla, which runs the popular broadband ISP performance testing service Speedtest.net and the real-time outage monitoring Downdetector site, has used data gathered from the latter to reveal which online services suffered the largest outages during 2024 – Facebook’s outage on 5th March tops the table. The Downdetector service typically identifies and monitors when various popular online websites and mobile or broadband ISPs are suffering from network problems, which...

Rome, 26 November 2024 Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators, announces the opening of an IP node in Genoa to meet the growing demand for internet transit driven by new technologies, multimedia platforms, and cloud-based services requiring highly efficient internet connectivity. The IP node is located at Sparkle’s Genoa Landing Hub data center in Lagaccio, an open and neutral colocation facility serving as an interconnection point for...

Network analyst firm Streetwave has been contracted to conduct a huge survey of mobile broadband network (4G, 5G) coverage, using bin lorries, which will this time focus on 8 council areas within Scotland’s Glasgow City Region – including North Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire, South Lanarkshire, Glasgow, East Dunbartonshire, and East Renfrewshire. The past year has seen Streetwave harnessing waste (bin / refuse) collection lorries to map mobile network / broadband coverage and speeds across...

Mobile network operator O2 (Virgin Media) has today announced that they’ve completed a project to upgrade the capacity of their 4G and 5G based mobile services across “over” 600 postcodes in the port city of Aberdeen (Scotland), which should mean “faster” mobile broadband speeds and greater reliability. The work, which began at the start of 2024, forms part of O2’s ongoing effort to invest £2m a day into their mobile network, which enables them to deploy new technologies and keep up with...

Debt-troubled UK internet provider TalkTalk has confirmed that its staff were yesterday informed about another round of significant redundancies, which one report indicates could affect almost a quarter (c. 130) of their consumer division workforce across the country. But the specifics won’t be known until after Christmas. The move comes shortly after the group’s recent decision to accept a refinancing package worth roughly £400m (here and here), which saved TalkTalk from the immediate risk of...

Mobile operator EE (BT) has come top in umlaut and Connect’s latest annual 2024 UK Mobile Network Test, which used a range of different benchmarks to test 4G (voice and data / broadband) and 5G performance across 19 cities, 27 towns and along 10,480km of major roads. On the flip side, O2 (Virgin Media) once again found themselves at the bottom. The study’s more scientific drivetests and walktests were both conducted between 28th October to 13th November 2024 using Samsung Galaxy S23...

News  Gelsinger has spent more than 40 years at the company  Intel has announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired.   Gelsinger, who also stepped down from Intel’s board of directors, first joined the company in 1979 and became its first chief technology officer in 2005. After spending few years at EMC and almost a decade as CEO of VMware, Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. Since then, he has overseen a pivotal period for the chipmaker as it worked to address major challenges in a...

News  The formation of the joint venture had been under discussion for over a year  Telefónica’s proposed sale of its Peruvian fibre optic network to private equity firm KKR and Chilean telecom operator Entel has collapsed, representing a major setback in the Spanish telecom giant’s efforts to streamline operations and reduce debt.   The deal, announced in July last year, would have seen KKR and Entel acquire a 54% and 10% stake in the network, respectively, valuing the business at...