Some 51,000 premises across the East Lothian settlement of Musselburgh in Scotland, including the surrounding area, will soon benefit after Netomnia, supported by UK ISP YouFibre, started a £15.3 million project to deploy a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network across the location. At present Musselburgh itself is only home to a […]

Mobile operator SMARTY, which is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) on Three UK’s national network, will sometime this morning launch a refreshed range of 4G and 5G capable Pay Monthly mobile plans that give new customers a bigger mobile broadband data allowance for less money. Not all of SMARTY’s packages are changing today, with […]

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A forecast by GlobalData suggests fixed wireless access (FWA) technology will more than double its subscription market share among US broadband technologies

Since the onset of the 5G era roughly three years ago, success stories for the new technology have been few and far between.

In fact, one of the biggest successes of 5G is not using the technology in conjunction with a smartphone at all, but rather using the more powerful mobile network to provide home broadband services in the form of FWA.

Reports earlier this year suggested that interest in FWA is booming in US, with the technology accounting for roughly 90% of the 3.5 million new broadband subscriptions added in 2022.

Now, an updated report from GobalData exploring the US broadband market suggests that this growth will continue, with FWA set to amount for 15.8% of all US broadband connections in 2028, up from for 7.2% in 2023.

The report noted the technology’s easy installation and flexibility as key advantages, noting that the technology is an increasingly viable option for homes and businesses that do not yet have access to fibre networks.

“Easy self-installation and affordability, combined with high reliability and performance, thanks to underlying 5G technology, are among FWA’s selling points, but so is the fact that FWA offers a new service choice versus existing solutions from incumbent service providers. Additionally, FWA is suitable for both primary and backup internet service and can be deployed in locations where internet service may only be needed temporarily,” explained GlobalData’s Principal Analyst Tammy Parker.

The report also noted, however, that FWA will ultimately have a hard time competing with the speed and reliability of fibre broadband – a technology that is set to become increasingly available throughout the US in the next five years due to the enormous amount of public funding being delivered as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“Fiber presents a significant challenge as it is highly reliable and can deliver the symmetrical multigigabit speeds that are increasingly demanded by consumers and businesses. Additionally, fibre deployment is gaining momentum as government subsidies lead to an unprecedented expansion of the nation’s fibre broadband infrastructure, leading this technology’s share of the market to grow from 19.5% in 2023 to 24.7% in 2028,” added Parker.

But despite the rise of fibre, FWA is sure to remain a complementary technology for many years to come, particularly in hard-to-reach areas where deploying fibre is unfeasible.

This increase in FWA’s popularity is not a purely US phenomenon. In India, for example, Bharti Airtel recently launched the country’s first 5G FWA offering, noting that just 34 million of the 303 million households in the country currently had access to fibre and so presented a major opportunity for FWA.

How is the rise of FWA impacting the US broadband market? Join the operators in discussion at Connected America 2024

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The pair’s latest trial offered users the chance to try mobile cloud gaming using a dedicated 5G standalone (SA) network slice

Could 5G standalone be a gamechanger for mobile cloud gaming? Vodafone and Ericsson think so, with their latest combined trial showing that 88% of gamers ranked their experience as 8/10 or above, compared to just 13% using non-optimised connectivity.

The trial, conducted at Coventry University, saw an undisclosed number of trialists invited to play cloud-based games on their smartphone in two different scenarios. Scenario A simulated a public network, while Scenario B used a 5G SA network slice that had been optimised for cloud gaming.

As a result of this optimisation, Scenario B’s network featured a 270% increase in download performance, a 25% decrease in latency, and 57% less jitter, according to Vodafone.

The results showed a clear distinction between the two scenarios. Of those experiencing cloud gaming using the Scenario A set-up, 63% rated the experience between 0/10 and 5/10, with just 13% ranking their experience as 8/10 or higher. By contract, of those experiencing the Scenario B set-up 88% ranked their experience as 8/10 or better.

“5G Standalone aims to deliver novel services that would not be possible on today’s networks. Few areas can benefit as much as cloud gaming, not only to improve customer experience, but to open the door to entirely new types of content. Today, immersive gaming is realistically limited to consoles and desktops, but with 5G Standalone, we can bring it to mobile devices,” said Phil Patel, Group Director of Product and Services at Vodafone.

“5G Standalone is not an upgrade on 4G, but an entirely new type of technology,” added Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer at Vodafone UK. “Through this trial, we provided a slice of connectivity, customised specifically for gaming, to provide a full fibre like experience over the airwaves. This is the value of network slicing – a more personalised connectivity service to make digital more in-tune with each customer.”

As always with Vodafone press releases of late, the company took the opportunity to espouse the virtues of their proposed merger with Three UK, noting that their proposed combined investment of £11 billion would see 5G SA coverage reach 99% of populated areas by 2034.

Indeed, Vodafone is already rolling out 5G SA in the UK, offering services to customers on the upgraded network via their ‘5G Ultra’ packages. However, it should be noted that the availability of 5G SA is currently limited, with only London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Cardiff included in the initial deployment, though more locations are expected to be added later this year.

What impact will 5G standalone and network slicing have on the type of services telcos can offer customers? Join the telecoms ecosystem in discussion at this year’s live Connected Britain conference

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The move is the latest in a string of AI-related investments from the South Korean telco, reflecting its ambitions of becoming an ‘AI company’

This week, SK Telecom (SKT) has announced that it has become the third-largest shareholder in Persona AI, a South Korean AI technology firm focussing on AI contact centre (AICC) solutions.

Persona AI has developed a natural language processing engine capable of voice recognition and sentence analysis that can directly handle customer interactions. After interacting with the customer, the AI can make suitable recommendations to the service’s operator and allowing for faster processing of requests and even automation of responses where appropriate.

In this way, businesses can offer 24/7 customer support through consultations with AI chatbots and phone bots, removing the need to connect to the human agent.

SKT says it will work together with Persona AI to co-develop further phone and chatbot products, incorporating SKT’s NUGU speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies alongside Persona AI’s natural language processing and generative technology.

Ultimately, SKT hopes to offer a pre-built AICC service to business customers on a subscription basis, which will encompass the entire AICC process from sales of solutions to consulting, infrastructure construction, maintenance, and business process outsourcing.

“We plan to expand the ecosystem so that voice AI can be used not only in AICC but also in various industrial areas,” said Lee Gyu-sik, SK Telecom’s AICC business manager.

The financial details of the deal and the size of the stake purchased have not been disclosed.

For SKT, the investment in Persona AI is the latest addition to their growing portfolio of AI investments, including, most recently, a $100 million stake in US AI firm Anthropic.

The operator has signalled its intention to become a AI powerhouse for over a year now, with SKT’s Chief Financial Officer Kim Jin Won noting that the firm was “stepping up efforts on all fronts to transform itself into an AI company”.

Back in July, the company joined forces with a trio of international telco giants – e&, Deutsche Telecom, and Singtel – to form the Global Telco AI Alliance, seeking to combine their collective AI expertise to help co-develop new, innovative products for telco customers.

Are operators using AI effectively to enhance their operations and service offerings for customers? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s live Total Telecom Congress in Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Mobile operator Vodafone UK and network supplier Ericsson have today announced that they’ve concluded a successful trial of cloud-based video gaming on their new 5G Standalone (SA) network, which delivered big improvements in gaming performance via mobile broadband (i.e. download / uploads speeds, latency and jitter). Unlike existing Non-Standalone (NSA) based 5G networks, which dominate […]

Broadband ISP BT (EE) claims that the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 has driven spikes of up to 16% in their UK data traffic as people streamed the Lionesses’ on-pitch action live, rising to a peak of 866TB (TeraBytes) during Sunday’s final against Spain – as many viewers streamed it via the BBC and ITV […]

Broadband ISP and network operator Brsk, which has so far built their own gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 266,000 UK premises – mostly around the Midlands (rollout plan), has today secured an “additional” £156m debt investment from funds managed by existing investor Ares. The operator, which in 2022 secured a funding boost of “up […]

Multiple industry sources have informed us that the Government’s Building Digital UK agency is fielding interest in a new funding option for rural-focused procurements under their £5bn Project Gigabit programme, which appears set to target smaller community style builds of around 200-500 properties. At present over 76% of UK premises can already access a gigabit-capable […]