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Press Release Sunderland City Council announces launch of a new ‘Sunderland App’ – a free tool designed to help residents and visitors to easily find their way round the city, access special offers with local retailers, cafes and restaurants, and make the most of everything Sunderland and the wider city has to offer. Dozens of independent restaurants, cafes and shops have signed up to the new Sunderland App, which offers residents and visitors a portable guide to city life. Developed by local...

News The £28.75 million initiative has seen 55 new 4G masts deployed in hard-to-reach areas across the country The Scottish government has published an evaluation of the recently completed Scottish 4G Infill Programme (S4GI). The S4GI, devised back in 2017, was aimed at deploying 4G LTE connectivity to not-spots across Scotland that were unlikely to be covered by private sector rollout programmes. The programme was backed by £28.75 million, £10 million of which was provided by the European...

Broadband ISP and mobile operator EE are preparing to trial delivery of their TV content via a new Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology in the “coming months“, which reflects BT’s effort to integrate their “world’s first” MAUD (Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery) solution into Edgio’s CDN. Most broadband and mobile operators use sophisticated Content Delivery Networks and systems to help manage network load, which caches popular internet content closer in the network to end-users (i.e....

Technology services company Telent and His Majesty’s (HM) Coastguard have today announced that one of the UK’s largest private broadband networks, which connects 163 remote radio sites across 11,000 miles of coastline, is now operational and helping to ensure an effective emergency response for people passing through the country’s waters. The £175m network, which is a mix of fibre optic and Microwave (wireless) connectivity (Telent helped to install 1,220km of new infrastructure), is said to...

Viewpoint For over a decade, the Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Primary Storage has remained largely unchanged, with little movement among the leaders. Published by IT consulting firm Gartner, MQ is a series of market research reports demonstrating market trends, such as direction, maturity and participants. Industry insiders now suggest that Gartner may be shifting its standard criteria and methodology to favour firms that can integrate with hyperscalers: large cloud service providers such as Amazon...

A coalition of 46 signatories (mostly in Scotland), including various outdoor conservation organisations, community councils / trusts and landowners, have again called on the UK government to avoid “needless damage to large areas of some of the wildest places” by reconsidering the rural expansion of 4G (broadband) mobile masts under the £1bn Shared Rural Network project. The industry-led SRN project with EE (BT), Vodafone, Three UK and O2 (Virgin Media) – supported by £501m of public funding...

Alternative network operator and broadband ISP CommunityFibre, which has deployed their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across around 1.4 million UK premises (mostly in London), has today announced that their customer base has grown to 300,000 (up from 200,000+ on 27th Nov 2023). The provider states that they’ve seen an 85% increase in their customer base over the past 12 months as more people look to alternative networks (Altnets) for faster, more affordable fibre...

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and Institute of Directors (IoD) have this week written to the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, in the hope of encouraging them to extend the automatic compensation scheme for consumer broadband outages to businesses. Easier said than done. The current voluntary system (full summary), which was first introduced in 2019, typically requires member ISPs to compensate consumers (cash or bill credits) by £9.76 per day for...

The next batch of four government-funded rural 4G (mobile broadband) mast upgrades have gone live in some of Britain’s most visited national parks, which forms part of the industry-led £1bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) project with EE (BT), Vodafone, Three UK and O2 (Virgin Media). The SRN – supported by £501m of public funding and £532m from operators – involves both the reciprocal sharing of existing masts in certain areas and the demand-led building and sharing of new masts in others between...

Alternative network ISP Fibrus, which is deploying a new multi-gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across rural parts of Cumbria and Northern Ireland, has today announced that they’ve secured an additional £100m tranche of Senior Debt and are now “fully funded to complete” their roll-out plan for 500,000 UK premises. The new funding package represents an increase to the Belfast-based operator’s existing £200m senior debt facility and £20m revolving credit facility...