“Open RAN is an opportunity today”: Mavenir talks openness and the future of 5G at Connected Britain
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...
India’s Supreme Court rejects telcos plea to recalculate AGR dues
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...
Oldham MP Calls for Calm After Protest Against IX Wireless’ New Broadband Masts
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...
Live sports streaming and traffic spikes: A remedy for rural networks
Contributed Article By Steve Miller-Jones VP, Product Strategy at Netskrt Systems Inc. The live streaming tsunami Live sports has quickly become some of the most-streamed content across digital platforms around the globe. Between live matches and Match of the Day highlights, the UK Premier League commands some 59% of the total UK TV audience. Meanwhile, the 2024 Uefa European Championship final was streamed by 24 million UK viewers according to SportsPro Media. While these viewership numbers...
Broadband Forum Push Home ISPs to Adopt Low Latency L4S Technology
The Broadband Forum has launched a new roadmap that they hope will aid ISPs in implementing the new Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable Throughput (L4S) technology, which has the potential to improve network latency times for popular UK internet activities like online video games, video conferencing, cloud gaming and so forth. Network latency is a measure of the time that it takes for a packet of data to travel from your computer to a remote server and then back again (ping). The delay is...
Study Warns Starlink Broadband Satellites Causing Problems for Radio Astronomy
A new study conducted by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) has warned that interference from the second (v2-Mini) generation of Starlink’s (SpaceX) broadband satellites is around 32 times stronger than their first generation spacecraft, which is causing growing problems for radio astronomy. Elon Musk’s Starlink network currently has 6,398 LEO satellites (c.2,200 are v2 Mini / GEN 2A) in Low Earth Orbit – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km – and they’re in the process of...
BT Deal Allows UK ISP Cuckoo to Sell Openreach Broadband Packages Again
A new wholesale agreement between BT Wholesale and AllPoints Fibre (APFN) has today been announced, which among other things means that anchor tenant ISP Cuckoo will be able to offer full fibre broadband (FTTP) packages via Openreach’s network.. again (some related services were withdrawn earlier this year and customers booted to a different ISP). Just to recap. Cuckoo is currently still in the process of becoming the main retail broadband ISP outlet for Fern Trading’s (Octopus Investments)...
FCC fines AT&T $13m over 2023 data breach
News The regulator said the operator had not done enough to protect consumer data This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reached a settlement with telco giant AT&T, fining them $13 million for their lack of oversight over customers’ data security. Back in January 2023, bad actors gained access to the data of 8.9 million AT&T customers via a cyberattack on an unnamed third-party cloud vendor. According to the FCC, this vendor was used by AT&T “to generate and...
Broadband ISP Cuckoo Retires Giganet Brand and Shifts UK Customers
Internet provider Cuckoo, which is the retail anchor tenant broadband ISP for the newly consolidated AllPoints Fibre network (comprising FTTP networks from Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre and Giganet), has today announced that the old Giganet brand is being retired and remaining customers fully migrated to Cuckoo. Cuckoo originally started life around four years ago as an independent ISP, which changed in 2022 after they were acquired by the Fern Trading backed Giganet (here). But last year’s...
Vodafone ads banned over misleading claims
News The decision from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) follows a complaint from rival telco BT This week, Vodafone Group has been ordered by the ASA to discontinue a trio of recent ads, with the regulator calling the ads “misleading” The ads, which were challenged by Vodafone’s rival BT, claim that customers could “switch from BT to Vodafone and get the same broadband for less”. Vodafone also claimed that “millions of BT customers across the UK are realising they can switch to...