Blocks of flats across the South East of England, specifically those from UK housing group Orbit, look set to benefit from a “new” plug-and-play solution to full fibre (FTTP) broadband deployment, which is to be delivered by fibre installations specialist Complete Fibre – supported by broadband ISP Lightning Fibre. Network builder and ISP Lightning Fibre […]

Rural focused UK broadband ISP GoFibre (BorderLink), which is deploying a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the North of England and Scottish Borders area, has today signed a new supply deal with Emtelle UK, which is a global manufacturer of blown fibre and ducted network solutions. Under the new deal, Emtelle will manufacture and […]

Network operator CityFibre has today announced that they’ve begun a £31.2m project to deploy their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband ISP network across the South Yorkshire town of Wath Upon Dearne, which is home to a local population of around 12,000. But it’ll go further than that. The level of committed investment seems […]

Some 85,000 homes and businesses across the Hertfordshire (England) town of Hitchin will soon benefit after Netomnia, supported by UK ISP YouFibre, started a significant £25.5 million project to deploy their new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network across the area. The operator has once again contracted civil engineering firm GNS Communications to […]

News

After receiving complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the ISP that its adverts were “misleadingly implying that a sixth-generation mobile network existed and was able to be used by consumers”

This week, the ASA has announced that it has banned a number of adverts from UK ISP 6G Internet, after receiving a complaint that the company’s name could lead consumers to believe the company was offering non-existent 6G mobile services.

After an assessment, the ASA ruled that 6G Internet may no longer use its adverts in their current form, saying customers could easily be confused into believing 6G mobile services were being offered.

6G Internet said they were not aware of any complaints from consumers or regulatory bodies about the confusion, arguing that their adverts made clear that the service being offered was home internet, not mobile services.

Regardless, the company has agreed to comply with the ASA’s decision regarding their adverts and has made minor changes on their website to hopefully clarify their service offerings.

“We make clear in all of our advertising the download speeds of our services and that we provide home broadband, as opposed to mobile broadband delivered using generations of cellular technologies,” explained 6G Internet in a statement. “Whilst we have not found, or been presented with, any evidence that our advertising has caused confusion, it is never our intention to mislead customers.”

6G Internet, which provides home broadband services using fixed wireless technology connected to local wholesale fibre networks, was founded back in 2013, at a time when even 5G mobile services were still but a glimmer in the wireless industry’s eye.

Nonetheless, the company’s brand name was always going to draw comparisons to the future mobile technology 6G, which is gradually growing more prominent in the public consciousness despite being unlikely to mature until 2028 at the earliest.

For now, 6G Internet has not indicated any intention of changing its brand name but, when the 6G mobile era arrives towards the end of the decade, further confusion on the part of consumers seems inevitable.

Ultimately, UK broadband consumers still have a very poor understanding of what technologies are being used to provide services. Earlier this year, for example, Ofcom found that only 46% of customers who believed they were receiving ‘full fibre broadband’ actually had fibre-to-the-home available to them. As a result, the regulator is currently pressing operators to clarify their broadband offerings and be more careful with the terminology used in advertising.

Are the UK’s ISPs doing enough to ensure customers understand what they are paying for? Join the network operators, regulators, and the wider telecoms industry in discussion at this year’s upcoming Connected Britain conference   

Also in the news:
Sky Business considers buying up TalkTalk B2B unit
Australian govt launches Telecommunications Disaster Resilience Innovation programme
SK Telecom to invest $100m in AI firm Anthropic  

Interview

We caught up with William Oliver, Senior Director of Product Management at Syniverse, to discuss the evolution of the wholesale roaming market and how operators can better manage their cashflow

Today, mobile operators are handling more roaming traffic than ever before, necessitating wholesale roaming agreements with hundreds of partners all over the world. These agreements carry varying degrees of complexity and regularly require massive manual calculations, particularly when it comes to discounts.

“You’re typically doing monthly billing to each other on wholesale roaming price. But if you’ve agreed a discount then after a year the operators need to calculate how much of a discount they need to give each other on that roaming traffic. That takes a long time – it may even be the quarter after the end-of-year period before you get the settlement for that discounted traffic. If you think of multiplying that by 500 or 600 roaming relationships, that’s a significant amount of work!” explained William Oliver, Senior Director of Product Management at Syniverse.

Not only is this process inefficient, it can also produce a major strain on an operator’s cash flow. To help reduce this impact, most operators use a technique known as ‘netting’, whereby the difference between two parties’ roaming bills is calculated and only this net value is paid. This cuts the number of transactions in half and reduces their size.

But Oliver notes that this concept can be taken even further, with Syniverse using ‘multilateral netting’ to calculate the net fees owed across a larger pool of operators that all have customers roaming on each other’s networks.

“We’re able to calculate quite accurately how much they are each going to pay each other at the end of the settlement cycle. We can take the receivable funds coming into an operator and use them to reduce their outgoings. That’s a really good way of optimising cash flow,” explained Oliver. “It’s the roaming departments obligation to protect those crown jewels – company cash flow.”

In fact, multilateral netting can even be made more efficient by expanding the process beyond just roaming bills to also incorporate additional payments between operators, including SMS interworking, IoT discounting, application-to-person (A2P) messaging, Rich Communication Services, and Billing and Charging Evolution (BCE).

The amount of transactions being handled here should not be underestimated. Indeed, aggregating all of these different forms of payment, Syniverse’s platform is clearing and settling around $4 billion a year and processing roughly 140,000 invoices monthly.

You can view our full interview with William Oliver from the link below

Want to learn more about maximising your roaming potential? Join Syniverse on their webinar ‘The five secrets to scaling wholesale roaming profitability’ on September 14 at 3pm. Register here

Also in the news:
Verizon strikes $2.1bn Managed Network Services deal with HCLTech
Cisco to buy-out Telenor from Working Group Two JV
Poland’s ‘largest ever’ broadband subsidy draws 300 applications

Telecoms giant BT has announced that, ahead of its iconic red phone box turning 100 years of age next year, around 1,000 of its 20,000 remaining kiosks (payphone boxes) are currently up for grabs across the United Kingdom (down from a historic peak of 92,000). Some 7,200 have already been adopted by communities across the […]

Budget focused broadband ISP TalkTalk has “suspended all door-to-door sales activity” in the Newcastle area after residents complained about cold calling occurring in parts of the city designated as a No Cold Calling Zone (NCCZ), which should be fairly self-explanatory to everybody, if not so much the sellers themselves, apparently. Almost nobody likes door-to-door sales, […]

Customers of UK broadband ISP BT and EE, specifically those taking their pay TV platform, may be unhappy to learn that the provider will be removing the premium AMC channel, and all catch up content, from all BT TV platforms from 28th September 2023 next month. The TV and video-on-demand channel itself is best known […]

The latest independent data from Thinkbroadband‘s database has revealed that alternative full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP networks (AltNets) now cover over a quarter (25.14%) of the UK, which is up from 23.64% at the end of June 2023. In terms of the top 10 locations where such networks dominate, Peterborough (84%) comes first. Just to […]