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Broadband and mobile provider Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) has today signed a new partnership that will see them adopting Trustly’s “next-generation” Direct Debit account automation and one-off Pay by Bank solutions. The goal is to streamline payments and onboarding processes as part of the UK operator’s commitment to “making customers’ lives easier“.

Granted, this isn’t exactly one of the most exciting developments to cover, so we’ll keep it short. Trustly’s new payments technology is expected to be integrated over the “coming months“. The new Direct Debit account automation with Pay by Bank should make it faster to sign-up for VMO2’s services, while one-off Pay by Bank payments will simplify customer payment processes and deliver a seamless connection to their bank accounts via Open Banking services.

Christian Hindennach, Chief Commercial Officer at VMO2, said: “We’ve been making real progress with our plans to improve the service we offer our customers over recent months … This partnership with Trustly will do exactly that – providing our customers with quick and secure ways to sign up and even simpler payment options to access our services, and ensuring we remain at the forefront of digital innovation.”

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

The SIM-Only mobile provider spusu, which holds a virtual operator (MVNO) agreement via BTWholesale to harness EE’s national 4G and 5G network, has today announced “sweeping cuts” to their international data (mobile broadband) roaming charges across 150 countries and slashing rates by at least 50% in over 100 of those.

At present spusu already offers limited free EU roaming across 38 countries (a fair usage cap applies to these), but roaming outside of those countries is still charged at the assigned rate specified in the operator’s most recent price guide. The big change today is with respect to those additional (non-EU) countries.

In short, roaming with spusu has apparently “become cheaper in many popular tourist destinations“. This means it now costs £4 per GigaByte (GB) of data to roam in popular holiday hotspots such as Turkey, the United States, Australia, Thailand and Singapore, and £7 per GigaByte to roam in Brazil, Canada, China, Mexico and Philippines.

One key difference here is that spusu previously priced by the MegaByte, rather than GigaByte (1024MB = 1GB). For example, back in June somebody travelling to Turkey would have paid £0.010 per MegaByte, thus 1GB of data usage would have cost you £10.24, and today it’s £4. This is not the cheapest for 1GB and eSIM Travel providers can beat that (heck you can get 1GB for free from Airalo), but it’s a big improvement on the old charges.

Christian Banhans, UK MD of spusu, said:

“The revised roaming pricing structure significantly enhances value for UK customers travelling abroad. Since launching in the UK in 2023, we’ve been committed to breaking down barriers for our customers. And with these changes, we’re ensuring our customers can travel further, worry less and enjoy more of what matters.”

In addition, to protect users from surprise bills, spusu recommends using their in-app spending cap, which prevents customers from exceeding their plans data allowance and facing additional charges. Users can adjust their caps from £0-100 in the ‘my spusu’ app, which also tracks usage and spending in real time. Spusu tracks usage in KiloBytes, which they say offers “better value and making sure that customers are only charged for what they use“.

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Mobile operator Three UK appears to have introduced one of the biggest discounts yet on their 4G and 5G powered unlimited Three Home Broadband packages, which have just been discounted to only £17 per month on a 24-month minimum contract term (or £28 if you take it as a rolling monthly plan).

As usual, Three’s Home Broadband packages all include a mobile router, while also promising “average download speeds of 150Mbps” (this will vary a lot between different locations) and a 30-day money-back guarantee (there’s no installation charge as it’s Plug & Play). But take note that Three UK’s pricing policy means that, each April, your Monthly Charge will increase by a fixed amount of £2 per month (doesn’t apply if you take their more expensive 30-day term).

The router being bundled with this, at least on their 5G variant of the package, is the MC888AD from ZTE (aka – ZTE MC888). This is based off the SDX62 (Snapdragon) + WCN6856 chipset and supports WiFi 6 at local network speeds of up to 3.8Gbps (2.4GHz and 5GHz 4×4 MIMO), as well as 2 x 1Gbps Ethernet (LAN) ports and 1 x RJ11 phone port.

At present there’s no indication of when the discounted pricing offer will expire.

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Broadband ISP and network builder Exascale, which has also deployed their own gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to a few thousands premises in part of Telford and Wrekin, has today signed a partnership to harness CityFibre’s network and thus deliver FTTP and Ethernet services to more UK homes and businesses.

CityFibre’s network currently covers around 4.5 million premises (inc. 550k customers) and they’ve long aspired to reach up to 8 million UK premises – representing c.30% of the UK. The new deal means that, with “immediate effect“, Exascale will be able to start offering gigabit-speed broadband and high-capacity Ethernet access via this network too.

One of the most powerful outcomes of this partnership is the ability for Exascale’s existing channel partners to gain overnight access to CityFibre’s extensive UK footprint, without delay or additional infrastructure investment. The move also comes shortly after CityFibre unveiled a major new funding agreement worth £2.3bn to help drive their expansion (here).

Thomas Bibb, CEO of Exascale, said:

“At Exascale, our mission has always been to provide fast and dependable connectivity across the UK. Partnering with CityFibre enables us to dramatically accelerate our full fibre rollout and bring world-class broadband to even more businesses and homes. We’re especially excited about the opportunity this brings to our channel community, who can now deliver services across CityFibre’s network instantly. This is a major leap forward for everyone involved.”

Ollie Moore, Account Manager at CityFibre, said:

“We’re excited to welcome Exascale to our partner ecosystem. Their deep technical expertise and commitment to customer satisfaction align strongly with our mission to transform the UK’s digital infrastructure. Together, we’re opening up new possibilities for partners and customers nationwide.”

Before pressing publish on this article we did attempt to test a couple of CityFibre postcodes via Exascale’s website, but both returned no positive results. So the effect may not be quite “immediate” for every part of Exascale’s platform.

We should add that this is a one-way agreement and CityFibre are not gaining any reciprocal access to Exascale’s own fibre.

Original article Total Telecom:Read More

Covington, La. (June 15, 2025)—Globalstar (NASDAQ: GSAT), a next-generation telecommunications infrastructure and technology provider, announces a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the United States Army. Under the agreement, Globalstar will collaborate with Army research and development teams to evaluate the performance of its advanced satellite data solutions for the Department of Defense including low probability of intercept/low probability of detect (LPI/LPD) communications for covert sensing, unmanned systems, congested logistics tracking, and tagging/tracking/locating (TTL) applications across various mission-aligned use cases.

The primary focus of the CRADA is to assess Globalstar’s ultra low size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) devices, which are well-aligned for long-duration field deployment with zero maintenance. These compact, SWaP-C-optimized solutions are engineered to operate in austere and remote environments, where traditional communications infrastructure is limited, undesirable use, or unavailable. Featuring built-in support for satellite connectivity, Globalstar enables small form factor and low cost for real-time alerting for field activity, environmental anomalies, or unmanned system operations, helping to enhance situational awareness at the tactical edge.

Enabling the power of onboard processing at the edge, Globalstar’s user terminals make dynamic, intelligent decisions without user intervention. The dynamic nature of the OTA messaging structure enables our devices to function with inherent low-probability-of-intercept (LPI) and low-probability-of-detection (LPD) capabilities. Combining these features with a multipath diversity LEO constellation makes the platform ideally suited for defense applications requiring secure, autonomous operation in contested or communications-denied environments.

“This collaboration reflects our growing engagement with defense and federal partners,” said Globalstar CEO Dr. Paul E. Jacobs. “We’re proud to bring our decades of satellite expertise and emerging terrestrial innovation to support the Army’s evaluation of next-generation satellite capabilities.”   

About Globalstar, Inc.

Globalstar empowers its customers to connect, transmit, and communicate smarter – easily, quickly, securely, and affordably – offering reliable satellite and terrestrial connectivity services as an international telecom infrastructure provider. The Company’s low Earth orbit (“LEO”) satellite constellation ensures secure data transmission for connecting and protecting assets, transmitting critical operational data, and saving lives for consumers, businesses, and government agencies across the globe. Globalstar’s terrestrial spectrum, Band 53, and its 5G variant, n53, offer carriers, cable companies, and system integrators a versatile, fully licensed channel for private networks with a growing ecosystem to improve customer wireless connectivity, while Globalstar’s XCOM RAN product offers significant capacity gains in dense wireless deployments. In addition to SPOT GPS messengers, Globalstar offers next-generation Internet of Things (“IoT”) hardware and software products for efficiently tracking and monitoring assets, processing smart data at the edge, and managing analytics with cloud-based telematics solutions to drive safety, productivity, and profitability. For more information, visit www.globalstar.com.

Original article Total Telecom:Read More

Press Release

TIM is positioning itself as a leader in AI also for consumer customers, offering an innovative service that improves their daily lives. TIM is the first operator in Italy to offer its fixed and mobile consumer customers one year’s free access to Perplexity Pro, one of the world’s most advanced generative Artificial Intelligence platforms, based on conversational interaction, real-time updates and answers with verified sources. The agreement with Perplexity reaffirms TIM’s pioneering role in technological innovation, bringing artificial intelligence within everyone’s reach and taking a further step towards the completion of the “Customer Platform” development strategy.

An advanced AI assistant for everyday life

Perplexity Pro provides clear, reliable and up-to-date answers to any question, from practical everyday queries to the most complex requests: from planning a trip, to investigating a study topic or comparing sales offers. All this through a simple voice or text-based interface that combines access to state-of-the-art language models with real-time web search.

In particular, the platform allows unlimited searches, convenient interactive voice sessions, document analysis and synthesis, content creation, images, web pages, presentations, interactive data dashboards, and automatic management of the most suitable AI templates for each type of request, responding in seconds and always citing sources. In just a few minutes, Perplexity Pro can analyse hundreds of documents and websites, enabling an immediate critical analysis of the results – instead of spending days on personal research. Perplexity Pro can choose from the main Large Language Models (LLMs) according to the customer’s request. In addition to Perplexity’s own model, it can also use the main established LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and R1 1776 (the US version of Deepseek R1).

Only TIM customers can therefore access this highly innovative AI service via the Perplexity platform, worth around 20 euros a month to other customers.

“This initiative puts Artificial Intelligence at the service of people, making it truly accessible to all TIM customers,” comments Andrea Rossini, Chief Consumer, Small & Medium & Mobile Wholesale Market Officer at TIM. “We are proud to be the first operator in Italy to offer an advanced AI assistant like Perplexity Pro, which marks a tangible step towards a new model of the digital relationship. Innovation, for us, means simplifying and improving the everyday experience, with solutions that are useful, reliable and affordable for everyone.”

“We are excited to collaborate with TIM to bring Perplexity Pro to users in Italy”, said Ryan Foutty, VP of business at Perplexity. “Accurate, trustworthy answers are essential to millions of decisions that Italians make every day, and TIM’s strengths as a technical pioneer make it a natural partner to provide valuable technology that improves daily life for all customers.”

How to activate the service

TIM customers can activate Perplexity Pro in just a few steps: just log in to TIM Party – TIM’s loyalty programme – from the app or website to request a free code to use on the Perplexity platform, either from desktop or smartphone.

The initiative sees TIM consolidate its Customer Platform strategy through agreements with top-tier partners, in a spirit of Open Innovation, bringing real innovation into people’s lives and confirming its role as a pioneer in making AI an integral part of everyday life.

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Also in the news:
US judge rules Huawei must face charges of fraud and racketeering
Optus ditches football rights to focus on telecoms
Nokia launches digital twin platform Enscryb to digitalise energy sector

Original article Total Telecom:Read More

Technology advances and growing demand for high-speed internet access are leading independent broadband firms to feel overwhelmingly positive about the future, according to a newly published survey measuring confidence in the sector.

Despite reports of their imminent demise, UK ‘altnet’ companies are expecting a boom in business over the next 12 months with 83 percent of decision makers expecting strong growth in the coming year, the first ever Altnet Confidence Index found.

Of the 300 surveyed decision makers from ISPs, network operators, and equipment and technology vendors, 23 percent of that number predict significant growth. When looking ahead to five years, 77 percent anticipate growth over that time.

“There has been a view for some time now that the UK’s alternative broadband sector was in decline,” said Proactive International PR CEO James Page. “With investors demanding to see returns on their investment and customers’ unwillingness to pay substantially higher prices for higher speed services, the future seemed to consist only of mergers, acquisitions and a sharply diminishing number of companies remaining in the market. As a B2B tech PR and marketing agency with deep experience in the fibre and broadband market, we wanted to gauge how the sector was feeling – and the results are surprising.”

The optimistic outlook means companies are ready to spend, with 77 percent of respondents planning to increase their investment over the next year, compared to the last 12 months. ‘Sustainability’ was the biggest priority for investment (39 percent), even above network build, on which 25 percent of respondents planned to spend.

Commissioned by Proactive International PR in partnership with Censuswide, the Altnet Confidence Index 2025 provides an in-depth look at the alternative broadband (altnet) sector, assessing its ability to grow, looking at where planned investment is focused and revealing the real view on consolidation in the industry.

For companies expecting growth, ‘Technological advancements’ were cited as the biggest driver by nearly half of respondents (45 percent), while ‘Private equity and investor interest’ and ‘Increased demand for high-speed internet’ each gave 35 per cent of professionals reason to be positive. Other reasons given included ‘Competitive differentiation and market gaps’ (33 percent), Fiber rollout and infrastructure expansion’ (33 percent) and Resilience of the industry’ (30 percent).

Despite the positivity, there are still causes for concern. ‘Rising operational costs’ worry 37 percent of respondents, as do ‘Increased regulatory pressures.’ A further 31 percent of respondents said ‘Consolidation of smaller players reducing opportunities’ was a concern.

However, the overall view on consolidation was favourable, with 70 percent of decision makers describing it as impacting their business very or somewhat positively.

“The brief for this survey was well suited to Censuswide as we can poll very specific audiences to achieve interesting narratives, as we see here,” said Censuswide’s Head of Client Services Lucy Stewart. “The findings were varied but overall, they followed some key themes. For example, when we looked at confidence and growth outlook there was a lot of optimism, both in the short and longer term. It’s really interesting to see that respondents are feeling so optimistic and we can dive into the data to look at some of the reasons for this.”

To read the full report, visit: Confidence Index 2025 | Proactive PR

ENDS

About Proactive International PR

Proactive International PR is a specialist B2B PR and marketing services agency for telecoms, data networking and technology brands. Its experienced core teams, based in Nottinghamshire, have a ‘proactive’ approach to communications and deliver world-class services, including the latest PR and digital marketing techniques. Founded in 2010, Proactive PR is one of the top 50 PR consultancies for technology in the UK, according to PR Week’s Top 150 2025.

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

Over the years we’ve seen various different uses for wireless WiFi signals being developed, such as the ability to see through walls (here) or to act as a motion sensing alarm system (here). Now a team of Italian researchers have figured out how to identify individual people by the biometric identifier they give off when walking through Wi-Fi signals.

According to a new research paper from a team at the La Sapienza University of Rome, the Wi-Fi Sensing method they’ve developed – called ‘WhoFi‘ – can essentially identify people based on the way that their bodies interfere with Wi-Fi signals as they pass through an area.

“The core insight is that as a Wi-Fi signal propagates through an environment, its waveform is altered by the presence and physical characteristics of objects and people along its path. These alterations, captured in the form of Channel State Information (CSI), contain rich biometric information,” said the paper. “Unlike optical systems that perceive only the outer surface of a person, Wi-Fi signals interact with internal structures, such as bones, organs, and body composition, resulting in person-specific signal distortions that act as a unique signature.”

In addition, and rather unlike existing visual ID systems (cameras etc.), Wi-Fi based ID systems are not affected by changes in visual illumination, can penetrate walls and occlusions, and also “offer a privacy-preserving mechanism for sensing” (i.e. you don’t need a visual picture of somebody).

Summary from the Research Paper

Person Re-Identification is a key and challenging task in video surveillance. While traditional methods rely on visual data, issues like poor lighting, occlusion, and suboptimal angles often hinder performance. To address these challenges, we introduce WhoFi, a novel pipeline that utilizes Wi-Fi signals for person re-identification. Biometric features are extracted from Channel State Information (CSI) and processed through a modular Deep Neural Network (DNN) featuring a Transformer-based encoder.

The network is trained using an in-batch negative loss function to learn robust and generalizable biometric signatures. Experiments on the NTU-Fi dataset show that our approach achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods, confirming its effectiveness in identifying individuals via Wi-Fi signals.

The research paper itself should be considered more of a starting point for further development, which proves that the concept may finally be viable. The next step will be to turn theory into a practical solution that works outside the lab. We should point out that the idea above has been experimentally researched before, but accuracy was a big problem, and the new paper largely seems to solve this issue.

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Broadband and mobile provider Vodafone (VodafoneThree) has today launched a new service called ‘Just Ask Once‘, which will essentially see “one person deal with a customer’s query from start to finish, until it is sorted“. The operator claims this will mean no more waiting on hold, no more transfers between agents and no more repeating yourself.

The goal of this seems to be to remove “well-known bug bears such as waiting on hold, repeating the problem to multiple different people, and the need to chase for an update”. Instead of that, customers can load up the feature via the MyVodafone app and respond to messages when it’s convenient.

In fairness, this is how a lot of online support / ticket systems already work, but Vodafone claims to be going further by ensuring that related requests are handled by the same agent. If the query can’t be resolved straight away, the same person from Vodafone will proactively message the customer with updates until it is solved. But if, after all that, they still can’t provide the service they’ve promised, then “customers can leave with no exit fee“.

Rob Winterschladen, Consumer Director of VodafoneThree, said:

“When it comes to customers, our ambition is simple: we want to be the best. We want to set the gold standard for customer service and that’s why we’re launching ‘Just Ask Once’.

’Just Ask Once’ is based on a really simple principle: when a customer needs help, they ask us once, and we will sort it. Customers can simply and quickly message us through the My Vodafone app at any time and importantly, they’ll only deal with one person until their query is sorted. There’s no more waiting on hold, no transfers between agents, and no more repeating themselves – allowing customers to get on with their day, while we get on with solving their problem.

If we can’t resolve a query immediately, we’ll proactively message the customer with updates until it is sorted, so they aren’t left worrying or having to chase us. What’s more, if we exhaust all avenues and can’t provide the service we promised, then we will let them leave with no exit fee. ‘Just Ask Once’ will level-up customer care and give our customers the most convenient and reliable support in the market.”

The idea of essentially having a dedicated manager for a specific issue or account is not a new one, although it’s usually considered more of a feature applied to more expensive business connections and not residential ones. This is because maintaining the assignment of a specific agent to a specific customer can be quite tricky and isn’t always the most cost-efficient way of using support staff.

The announcement doesn’t say it, but we strongly suspect Vodafone will be making a fair bit of use of AI and automation for this system to be viable at the consumer level. In that sense, a lot of the updates may end up coming from a computer rather than a human, since automation can be used to tackle a lot of the more laborious elements in this sort of process. But that’s just our speculation.

‘Just Ask Once’ is also available for small office/home office (SOHO) business customers with 1-9 employees via the same app. Customers who don’t want to contact Vodafone customer service using the My Vodafone app can of course still get help by calling 191 on their mobile or through the Vodafone website.

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Alternative network operator Netomnia (Brsk, Youfibre) has today published their Q2 2025 results, which reveals that their multi-gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network now covers 2.56 million UK premises (up 243k in the quarter) and is home to 341,000 customers (up 54k).

The results mean that the operator is still on-track for their current coverage goals and EBITDA positivity in 2025. Netomnia continues to expand their network coverage by around 1 million premises per year, and they expect to reach 3 million premises by the end of 2025 and then 5 million by the end of 2027 (inc. 1 million customers by 2028). The service is currently available across parts of over 90 UK cities and towns.

In addition, Netomnia’s take-up rate has increased by one percentage point during the first quarter, going from 12.4% in Q1 to 13.4% in Q2. This is particularly positive given the operator’s rapid rate of build, which normally has a tendency to suppress the percentage growth in take-up (i.e. building to many more premises than the rate of customer adoption).

The brief results also reveal that the operator delivered £23.6m in quarterly revenue (up from £19.9m in Q1 and 256% year-on-year) and adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) of (£4.9m) – up 30% YoY, the latter of which excludes exceptional items. But the ongoing network builds inevitably mean that Net Debt has also grown to £709m (up 16% Quarter-on-Quarter from £610m – debt drawn to date including accrued interest less cash).

Jeremy Chelot, Group CEO of Netomnia, YouFibre and brsk, said:

“We now have the fastest network build and customer acquisition rate among Alt-Nets. We’re on track to reach 3 million premises passed and achieve EBITDA positivity in 2025. With plans to scale to 5 million premises by 2027, we remain the UK’s most scaled and capital-efficient retail and wholesale platform, positioned to lead industry consolidation.”

The question of consolidation remains an interesting one for a network operator in Netomnia’s position, not least because it may require additional investment in order to deliver any deals of scale, and they might then find themselves battling against CityFibre and Nexfibre (Virgin Media) for some of the same players.

On the other hand, DigitalBridge also backs Freedom Fibre and the two have very little overbuild (the networks are also very close together – complementary), which could be one potential target. Jeremy Chelot’s former haunt of CommunityFibre in London might be another possibility, although that would require a serious funding agreement, but the two do have a somewhat complementary approach to build and no overbuild.

Some other options might be MS3, Trooli and a few others. Time will tell.