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Press Release Nokia today announced the launch of a new sustainability calculator for private wireless networks for enterprises. This tool helps companies estimate the environmental and social benefits of using private wireless networks and the new Industry 4.0 applications they enable. Notable benefits include improved operations, reduced costs and carbon emissions, and fewer workplace accidents. Nokia commissioned PwC UK to support the development of a Private Wireless Sustainability...

In a rather unusual service outage, some of Sky UK’s customers are suffering from a serious and ongoing issue that is preventing them from being able to switch-on their broadband-based Sky Glass and Sky Stream pay TV streaming devices. We can’t say we’ve ever heard of many issues quite like this one before, but hopefully the devices can be remotely recovered. The bulk of complaints about this most bizarre of faults began to surface just before 5pm yesterday and more issues started to be...

The annual Mobile Industry Awards event for 2024 was held last night at the Royal Lancaster in London, which among other categories saw Sky Mobile being named the ‘Best MVNO‘ (virtual) operator, while EE won the ‘Retailer of the Year‘ and VOXI’s GenAI Chatbot was named ‘Innovation of the Year‘. As usual, this is one of those industry events where the shortlists for each of the categories are all judged by a panel of 20 people who either work directly within or alongside the same industry, with...

A new London-registered alternative network provider called Countryside Fibre has cropped up with a plan to deploy a gigabit-capable full fibre broadband network (FTTP vs GPON) across parts of North Somerset in England. The provider will sell packages both directly to homes and businesses, as well as via wholesale through other ISPs. Applications for Code Powers are typically sought to help speed-up deployments of new fibre and cut costs, not least by reducing the number of licences needed for...

News The operator says it is the first in the country to launch 5G standalone (SA) on a “national scale” This week, French mobile network operator Free, owned by telecoms giant Iliad Group, has announced the launch of 5G SA services. “Today, Free is announcing that it has deployed 5G SA (Standalone Access) on the 3.5 GHz frequencies of its public network on a national scale. By doing this, it has become the first mobile operator in France to offer this technology to its subscribers,” reads the...

News The savings come as part of a partnership with data centre software specialist EkkoSense According to Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), working in partnership with EkkoSense across 20 of the company’s UK data centres has led to an average saving of 15% in data centre cooling energy usage. In environmental terms, this means reducing the company’s carbon footprint by around 760 tonnes per year. In financial terms, it’s a reduction in energy bills of over £1 million a year. These savings have been...

In a fascinating development, researchers in Japan are deploying and deploying a way of making 5G mobile (mobile broadband) infrastructure more discreet by creating transparent glass antennas that make it possible for windows to serve as base stations. Modern 5G and future 6G networks only tend to deliver their best multi-Gigabit broadband speeds when they’re able to harness lots of higher frequency mobile spectrum. However, due to the limitations of signal propagation over distance from such...

Interview At this year’s Connected Britain, Total Telecom’s Georgia Sweeting caught up with Mavenir’s SVP GM EMEA, Virtyt Koshi, to discuss the latest trends in Open RAN, the value of fixed and mobile convergence, and some of the biggest emerging opportunities for telcos in 2024 Watch our full interview with Virtyt below: Keep up to date with all of the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter Also in the news: Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models...

News Telcos Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel both owe the government billions of dollars in adjusted gross revenue (AGR) payments This week, India’s Supreme Court has rejected the latest appeals from Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea that seek to have debts they owe the government recalculated. The AGR fees, which amount to a combined total of roughly $11 billion, were calculated by the government in a court ruling back in 2019. Since then, the affected telcos have been arguing to have the fees...

The Labour MP for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton, Jim McMahon, has called for “calm” after local residents in the town began protesting against the deployment of new metal masts by IX Wireless, which is building a new fibre-fed UK fixed wireless broadband network – supported by ISP 6Gi (Opus Broadband). The company, which has previously spoken of their aspiration to cover 250,000 UK premises with their new network (here), is currently building their hybrid fibre and wireless broadband...