Residents in the rural Powys (Wales) village of Llangedwyn – including neighbours in Llanfihangel (and possibly others) – have complained after their long-awaited rollout of a new full fibre (FTTP) broadband network, which was due to be built by Broadway Partners, was put on hold due to the UK’s £5bn Project Gigabit scheme. Network operator […]

We’ve today returned to conduct our brief annual study of how much UK broadband ISPs are charging consumers for their top gigabit broadband (1Gbps+) tiers. The good news is that prices – driven by aggressive competition – broadly continue to fall, albeit not by as much as we saw between 2021 and 2022. For the […]

The UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has today revealed their progress and learnings from the first phase of the £6.2m “Fibre in Water” trial, which aims to test the deployment of fibre optic (FTTP) broadband cables through a live water mains (used for drinking water). The original trial (details), which started […]

News

The 5G-powered solution offers users over 3,000 interactive simulated experiences, from swimming with whales beneath the sea to driving factory forklift trucks

Today, BT has announced the launch of their Immersive Spaces solution, in partnership with virtual training specialist Immersive Interactive.

The Immersive Spaces use projectors to create interactive walls and floors, which can then display any of over 3,000 interactive experiences that are stored in the cloud. Users can interact directly with the experiences by touching the walls, from answering a multiple-choice questionnaire to navigating through a virtual world.

Additional senses can also be incorporated to make the experiences even more immersive, such as the use of smells and emerging haptic technology. The spaces are also compatible with virtual reality, augmented reality, and extended reality technologies and can be used to live-stream video.

Finally, users will be able to create their own tailor-made experiences using the platform, such as bespoke classroom or training experiences.

Speaking to journalists at a live demonstration at BT headquarters earlier this week, Ian Robertson, Technical Principal 5G Solutions at BT, explained that the Immersive Space could specifically designed and deployed within a dedicated location, like a classroom, or delivered as a temporary mobile unit. Robertson explained that the mobile space – seen in image above – could be folded down to load on a flat-bed truck, with an effective deployment time of under an hour once it reached its location.

“Immersive Spaces bring together EE’s unrivalled connectivity with the very best immersive tech – combining the real and digital worlds to create new benefits for business and public sector organisations,” said Alex Foster, Director at Division X – BT’s business innovation team.

“This technology has the potential to be a game changer for training and development in any industry. Putting the power of immersive content into the hands of customers allows people to experience learning in a completely new way that is targeted specifically to their needs – which can significantly improve information retention and problem-solving skills. It can also enrich remote sales experiences, add a new layer to gaming and sports, and transport people virtually to any location, anywhere, during any point in history.”

While the potential of this technology is surely enormous – with BT exploring use cases for education, healthcare, retail, transport, tourism, manufacturing, construction, and sport – it seems that initial interest seems to be driven largely by training and education applications.

Indeed, BT has already deployed its Immersive Spaces at schools – Borders College in Galashiels, Scotland and Cadoxton Primary School in South Wales – with encouraging results.

“The children absolutely love it,” said Hannah Cogbill, senior leadership at Cadoxton Primary School.  “Their favourite one so far is life under the sea. We can’t wait to explore more of the experiences and collections and then begin to develop our own content. We are looking forward to using it to support our children’s development and progression of imaginative writing. But it will also be a great scaffold to support learners with pre-experiences that they might be nervous about – for example catching a train or going on an aeroplane.”

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Press Release

The new center will have more than 100 highly qualified experts by the end of the year, which will grow to more than 300 in three years. These experts will work in coordination with Telefónica Tech’s global operations team.

Telefónica Tech today inaugurated a new Digital Operations Center (DOC) at its Bogotá headquarters, in addition to the one that it opened last year in Madrid, to complement its global Cyber Security and Cloud operations capabilities.

José Cerdán, CEO of Telefónica Tech; Alfonso Gómez, CEO of Telefónica Hispam; María Jesús Almazor, CEO of Cyber Security and Cloud for Telefónica Tech; and Fabián Hernández, CEO of Telefónica Colombia, were some of the company’s executives who attended the opening ceremony. The presentation was also attended by Mauricio Lizcano Arango, Minister of Information and Communication Technologies of the Government of Colombia, and more than 40 representatives of local institutions and companies.

Telefónica Tech’s Colombia DOC has an area of 500 square metres in size and has global capacities to reinforce the operations services in all the countries in which the company is present, especially in the Hispam region and in the USA, as it shares a time zone with many of the countries in the Americas, and this means that it can also provide extended hours of support to customers in Europe.

Telefónica Tech has reinforced its operations team in Colombia and plans for the country’s DOC to have more than a hundred highly qualified experts by the end of the year, and for this to grow to more than 300 in three years. These experts’ services are marketed in the Hispam region through Movistar Empresas. The Colombia DOC team will work in coordination with the professionals that make up Telefónica Tech’s global operations area and will strengthen the network of 11 Security Operations Centers (SOCs) that the company has around the world.

From the Colombia DOC, just as with the Madrid space, Telefónica Tech’s Cyber Security and Cloud operations professionals will monitor and supervise customers’ security and cloud services 24 hours a day, every day of the year, to detect, manage and resolve any incident.

José Cerdán, CEO of Telefónica Tech, said: “This new Digital Operations Center (DOC) reinforces our role as a global technology benchmark for the protection of companies undergoing digital transformation. The experience of our professionals and our comprehensive proposal of Cloud and Cyber Security services allows us to offer customers differential solutions and guarantee high levels of confidentiality, integrity, security and availability of data and assets”.

Extensive global capabilities

The Telefónica Tech team is made up of more than 6,200 professionals of 28 different nationalities and with more than 4,000 certifications in third-party technologies. Of these, 5,500 professionals are from Cyber Security and Cloud operations, who deal with 350,000 security event tickets and around 500,000 alerts per year, of which 13,000 are critical.

Telefónica Tech’s operations professionals supervise the security of more than 15,000 devices and execute around 600 mitigations in industrialised services, such as those aimed at avoiding Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, in which there is a high degree of automation.

In addition, through the digital surveillance service, they manage more than 120,000 notifications that generate more than 6,000 reports and specific investigations, and during the last year they have closed down 8,500 fraudulent sites related to brand abuse and phishing (a type of attack in which someone impersonates an entity or service through an email or instant message to obtain the user’s credentials or information).

Telefónica Tech closed the first quarter of 2023 with revenue growth of 43.5%, reaching 429 million euros, and recording double-digit growth in both the Cyber Security and Cloud division and in the IoT and Big Data division.

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News

Vodafone Health will work with the healthcare sector to facilitate telehealth and co-develop new solutions

The UK’s healthcare sector has something of a reputation for its labyrinthine bureaucracy and its overreliance on outdated technology. In the past few years, however, this is beginning to change, with both the public and private sector proving willing to engage with telecoms and technology companies to help facilitate more streamlined and efficient patient care – especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, Vodafone is making its commitment to the healthcare sector known with the creation of a new business unit called Vodafone Health, aiming at working alongside the medical sector too “accelerate digital transformation” of the sector and “support the delivery of better patient outcomes”.

The new business unit will be led by industry expert Anne-Marie Vine-Lott.

“I’m really excited to be leading the newly created Vodafone in Health division which will act as a technology advisor and innovation hub for all our healthcare partners and customers,” said Anne-Marie Vine-Lott, Head of Health for Vodafone UK. “Our focus is on supporting health providers to work beyond organisational boundaries. To help them drive better outcomes for patients through better connectivity and the modernisation of technology.”

Vodafone’s growing interested in the healthcare sector has been apparent for many years now. Back in 2020, for example, the operator deployed a 5G private network at the University Hospital Dusseldorf, creating what they said at the time was the first 5G-powered clinic in Europe.

In fact, the formation of the Vodafone Health business unit seems to build on Vodafone’s virtual Centre for Health, which it launched in partnership with Deloitte in 2021. At the time, Vodafone said it would seek to combine its connectivity solutions with Deloitte’s significant experience in the healthcare sector to help develop healthcare solutions and support the sector’s digitalisation.

Vine-Lott was made the Head of the Centre for Health at the end of last year and she will continue to oversee the unit as the Director of the new Health business unit.

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Mobile operator EE (BT) has announced that they will conduct an initial pilot of their 3G withdrawal scheme in the Cheshire (England) town of Warrington from 17th July 2023. This will be followed by their national programme, which aims to move customers off the old data (mobile broadband) network by early 2024. Just to recap. […]

Broadband ISP Airband, which is deploying a mix of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks across various parts of the UK, has announced that they’ve so far laid 134km of fibre optic cable across Worcestershire (England) and have plans to deploy a lot more. The operator, which is supported by Aberdeen Standard […]

Internet provider Cuckoo (Giganet) has moved to make its customer service more accessible by agreeing a new partnership with Sign Solutions, which means that customers who are deaf can now contact the broadband ISP using British Sign Language (BSL) via a video interpreter. The move is said to complement the provider’s wider “efforts to make […]

Oxfordshire-based full fibre network builder and UK ISP Zzoomm has added the small Yorkshire town of Richmond, which is home to around 8,400 people, to their rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network. The first customers are already going live. The operator, which aims to cover 1 million premises across 85 UK towns […]