News

The magenta giant has pledged to ‘supercharge’ the Mint Mobile brand while retaining the marketing bite of celebrity owner Ryan Reynolds

T-Mobile is set to purchase Ka’ena Corporation, the parent company of prepaid mobile virtual network operator Mint Mobile.

The Uncarrier will pay up to $1.35 billion for the company, with final amount varying based on Ka’ena’s performance during certain periods both before and after the deal closes. The sum will be paid in a combination of cash and shares.

The deal also includes the Ultra Mobile, a brand focussed on enabling cost-effective international  calls, and the wireless wholesaler Plum.

“Mint has built an incredibly successful digital direct-to-consumer business that continues to deliver for customers on the Un-carrier’s leading 5G network and now we are excited to use our scale and owners’ economics to help supercharge it – and Ultra Mobile – into the future,” said Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile. “Over the long-term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile. We think customers are really going to win with a more competitive and expansive Mint and Ultra.”

Following the acquisition, T-Mobile says that Mint will continue to operate largely as an independent business, headed up by Mint co-founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim. T-Mobile also says it will retain the company’s $15 per month price point.

Mint Mobile was formally put up for sale back in 2021, at which time it was rumoured to be worth between $600 million and $800 million. Numerous companies were hinted at as potential suitors, perhaps most notably Altice USA.

However, reports that T-Mobile was interested in acquiring the company, only surfaced at the start of the year.

Mint has seen a meteoric rise to prominence in recent years, helped in no small part by the advertising prowess of movie star owner Ryan Reynolds, who took a 20–25% stake in Mint back in 2019 for an undisclosed sum.

Since then, he has starred in numerous adverts for the company, something that will presumably continue under the company’s new ownership.

“We are so happy T-Mobile beat out an aggressive last-minute bid from my mom Tammy Reynolds as we believe the excellence of their 5G network will provide a better strategic fit than my mom’s slightly-above-average mahjong skills,” said Reynolds in a statement.

The deal is expected to close later this year following the typical regulatory oversight.

How is the US connectivity landscape changing in 2023? Join the debate next week at the Connected America conference live in Dallas!

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Spring Equinox? It seems Ofcom aren’t certain of the balance

Press Release

New long-term, multi-million-pound investment gives BT’s UK business customers access to edge computing services – with the first site now live for customer trials in Manchester, before general availability targeted for later this year

BT today announced a multi-million-pound investment to bring 5G and 4G mobile edge computing services to its UK business customers in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The work combines AWS’s cloud expertise with BT’s market-leading 5G and 4G infrastructure. EE’s national mobile network with AWS Wavelength will bring the power of AWS to the network edge for more business and public sector customers across the UK – opening up faster, secure and high-bandwidth connectivity on the move for use cases like policing, crowd management, healthcare and security.

The effort is part of BT’s investment in its existing mobile networks, to enable 5G-connected infrastructure as a service via AWS Wavelength. This includes switching on a new AWS Wavelength Zone in Manchester, which will service trials for eligible businesses and public sector organisations within a 100-kilometre radius (including cities such as Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Blackpool). BT’s ambition is to roll out AWS Wavelength to business customers across the UK more broadly in the coming years.

AWS Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services within 5G and 4G networks, providing mobile edge computing infrastructure for ultra-low-latency applications. Hosting services directly at the edge of EE’s UK network reduces lag, as application traffic can reach application servers running in the AWS Wavelength Zone without leaving BT’s network. This opens up mobile edge computing infrastructure for businesses to develop, deploy, and scale mobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications over BT’s existing 5G network securely

The collaboration aims to enable high-speed, latency-sensitive and intensive 5G connectivity for BT customers looking to benefit from high-bandwidth IoT use cases in the field. This includes autonomous vehicles, cameras for policing and other public services to help protect communities, live media production for outside broadcast, smart industrial robots, and use in community healthcare (such as in care homes to monitor for falls and accidents).

BT’s Wholesale unit has worked with AWS on the initial trials in Manchester. After the planned national rollout, the service will be available to all BT business customers in the UK – from small businesses to large enterprise and public sector organisations.

Alex Tempest, Managing Director for BT Wholesale said: “As we continue to build best-in-class 5G infrastructure for the UK, launching the AWS Wavelength service for our business and wholesale customers is a hugely important step on our journey – bringing the power of the cloud to the UK’s best network. It’s set to unlock use cases like IoT cameras to help first responders keep communities safe: a real-life example of using tech to connect for good.

“By building cloud edge services into our 5G and 4G EE network, we can accelerate innovation across industries, and bring fast, secure data processing closer to where our customers need it most. Ultimately, we want to give businesses and public sector organisations all the power of edge computing, wherever they are.”

How is the migration to the public cloud impacting the telecoms landscape in the UK? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s live Connected North conference in Manchester

Also in the news:
Fibre overtakes cable in the Netherlands
Ericsson IoT Accelerator to manage the connectivity for Lyft e-bikes and scooters
Spring Equinox? It seems Ofcom aren’t certain of the balance

News

Reports suggest that Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) has entered talks to purchase CItyFibre, the UK’s largest altnet, in a deal that could be valued at over £3 billion

This weekend, a report from The Telegraph suggests that VMO2 could be interested in purchasing its fibre rival, CityFibre.

According to the report, Mike Fries, CEO of VMO2’s parent company Liberty Global, and Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, have entered into “initial talks” over the possibility of VMO2 presenting CityFIbre with a roughly £3 billion takeover bid.

If such a deal were to take place, it would represent a major dynamic shift for the UK broadband market, seeing the country’s largest altnet and third-largest fixed network operator absorbed into the UK’s second-place broadband player.

VMO2’s broadband networks currently covers over 16 million premises. However, only around 1.7 million of these premises are passed with fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), with the rest (roughly 14.3 million) using hybrid fibre coax (HFC) technology.

It is worth noting here that VMO2 finished upgrading its HFC network to DOCSIS 3.1 technology at the end of 2021, hence all of its existing customers now have access to gigabit-capable broadband speeds. Since then, the company has focussed on further upgrading its HFC network to FTTP, aiming to transition the entirety of its broadband footprint to full fibre by 2028.

CityFibre, meanwhile, is a purely wholesale full fibre player, having passed roughly 2.5 million premises FTTP, according to its most recent figures. The operator is currently aiming to cover 8 million premises by 2025.

Thus, for VMO2, the acquisition of CityFibre could be seen as a relatively quick way for the conveerged operator to race towards its ambitious fibre target of passing 23 million premises with FTTP by the end of 2026.

In practice, however, VMO2 and CityFibre’s networks overlap considerably. According to The Telegraph, the two companies’ footprints overlap by around 50%, but some digging by thinkbroadband.com suggests that this could be “as high as 70%”.

Given this much network redundancy and CityFibre’s expensive price tag, it seems unlikely that VMO2 would be interested in acquiring the company directly.

However, a merger between CityFibre and NexFibre ­– the wholesale fibre joint venture (JV) launched by Liberty Global, Telefonica, and InfraVia Capital last summer – could be much more appealing.

Backed by an investment of £4.5 billion, NexFibre aims to cover 7 million UK premises outside of VMO2’s existing broadband footprint with FTTP. The company will offer services on a neutral wholesale basis to the nation’s ISPs, with VMO2 as an anchor tenant.

For Liberty, the acquisition of CityFibre by NexFibre could serve a dual purpose, not only giving the their JV a headstart when it comes to rollout numbers but also taking one of VMO2’s leading competitors out of the market.

As such, it should come as no surprise that any deal via either VMO2 or NexFibre would face intense regulatory scrutiny, with the Competition and Markets Authority having to carefully estimate the state of the UK broadband market if it were to lose CityFibre as a competitor.

In related news, VMO2 has recently been linked to discussions over acquiring Trooli, another of the UK’s altnets.

How is the altnet landscape changing in 2023? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s live Connected North conference in Manchester

Also in the news:
Fibre overtakes cable in the Netherlands
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Press Release

Netomnia, one of the fastest growing altnets in the UK, along with ISP sister company YouFibre, has raised £230 million in committed debt financing

Netomnia has successfully completed its latest fundraise of £230 million in committed debt financing from a group of six bank lenders, comprised of HSBC UK, ING, NIBC, RBC, Standard Chartered, and UKIB. The financing package also includes an accordion to be raised in the future to support the continued growth of the business.

The backing comes at a pivotal moment in Netomnia’s network deployment. The company, known for its fast network rollout and efficient use of capital, has become the fourth largest altnet in the UK in two and half years, recently passing 410,000 premises ready for service and connecting 28,000 customers. Its build speed continues to accelerate as it closes in on the goal of 1 million homes and businesses passed.

Wil Wadsworth, CFO at Netomnia and YouFibre, says, “We are very pleased to welcome this new group of lenders to Netomnia and are thrilled they have chosen to support the continued acceleration of our business. The enthusiasm from these institutions to support our business is a testament to our successes at Netomnia and YouFibre, and our unique approach to building our full fibre network and providing best-in-class Internet speeds and services to customers across the UK.

“Everyone in the UK is impacted by the rising cost of living, and interest rates are hitting businesses and families alike. Now more than ever it’s vital that we continue to build our network at pace to provide better and more affordable broadband to as many homes and businesses as we can.”

How is the altnet landscape changing in 2023? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s live Connected North conference in Manchester

Also in the news:
Fibre overtakes cable in the Netherlands
Ericsson IoT Accelerator to manage the connectivity for Lyft e-bikes and scooters
Spring Equinox? It seems Ofcom aren’t certain of the balance

The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has posted a small interim update to the data they hold on fixed line home broadband ISP speeds, which reveals that the average (median) UK download speed has increased to 65.3Mbps (up by 10% from 59.4Mbps six months ago) and uploads hit 15.5Mbps (up by 45% from 10.7Mbps). Ofcom’s study […]

Rural network builder and UK ISP GoFibre, which is deploying a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across the North of England and Scottish Borders, has today announced their new full fibre network has started to go live in the Aberdeenshire towns of Portlethen and Newtonhill. The operator, which is currently being supported by […]

Startup Stories

Dutch startup OPT/NET creates AI products for a variety of critical and data-intensive industries, but far from replacing humans, they want to make them superhuman with AI-assistance.

Tell us about your start up
At OPT/NET, we are a fresh entrant into the AIOPs industry. The complexity of IT systems is increasing exponentially. The users running these systems are struggling to keep up. Inevitably, mistakes are made, and costly outages occur. One day of downtime costs large enterprises over 7M$ per day. By leveraging AI, we empower network operators with intelligent data-driven insights so they have the full live picture of everything that’s happening within their networks. We ingest all of the network telemetry (logs, metrics, KPIs, etc) available to deliver real-time proactive intelligence on brewing issues in the network. Our goal is to find the issues before they impact the service and customers.

What is your USP?
We have 3 key technological differentiators:

Our patented AI approach can derive anomalous sequences of events and determine causality between events. This lets operators trace back the impact to the root causes far more efficiently than competing solutions.
Every network is different and no one-size fits all solution will properly work. We’ve built a modular “composable” AI architecture so that we can support any Customer’s IT landscape with “out of the box” capability.
Our approach requires no model training and works with raw data from day 1. The AI detects and clusters anomalous network activity, and we leave the conclusion-making to domain experts whose expertise is retained by the platform post-interpretation.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
The Telecom Sector is our primary market of interest. Our main Customers are large Network Operators (CSPs) and our product is best suited to IT-Infrastructure monitoring, making it a great fit for the Telecom industry.

How have you got to your current stage of development?
Our product first started as an Open Source Network management/discovery solution called NG-NETMS. This product was first launched in 2013 and has been downloaded over 200K times with positive reviews. Subsequently, we took part in the European Space Agency’s Technology Transfer program to start developing an AI module for our product by incorporating some of their space-worthy algorithms. Next, we collaborated with the AI institute of the University of Amsterdam (top 5 AI institute in Europe) to further advance our Machine Learning module. Finally, in 2018, we pivoted from a Consulting company to a product-based company to bring our new product: OptOSS AI to the market.

Why did you establish the business?
OPT/NET was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from OPT/NET Consulting to focus on bringing the product to the Telecom industry. The founding team considered that the technology that had been built was a more scalable that providing traditional consulting services. Now that we have several large Telcos using our product, we are glad we made the transition.

Who inspired you?
We were inspired by our own consultants. They were struggling to find solutions on the market that could assist them in their IT-Infra data analysis activities so we started developing internally to assist them. Now, we are inspired by our Customers who are glad about their choice of opting for OPT/NET and often show us how it helped them solve brewing issues in their IT-Infrastructure!

What does the future hold for your business?
We hope to continue to grow! To do so, we are aiming to raise 2M in equity financing. We have our first key customers who are extremely satisfied proving we have a product-market fit. We can continue to grow organically but aim to raise funding to aggressively invest in outbound sales to entrench ourselves in a strong position in Europe for the quickly growing AIOps industry

COMPANY CV
Founded: 2018
HQ: The Netherlands
URL: https://www.opt-net.eu/
CEO and Founder: Taras Matselyukh

OPT/NET will participate in the Startup Village at the Total Telecom Congress, taking place at The RAI this November. If you would like your startup to join them, visit www.totaltele.com/congress for more information.

 

A major newspaper has reported that broadband ISP and mobile giant VMO2 (Virgin Media and O2) has held “initial talks” over the possibility of mounting a £3bn takeover bid for the UK’s third-largest alternative full fibre network (AltNet), CityFibre. But such a deal could face regulatory and competition concerns. The Telegraph (paywall) actually clarifies in […]

Selected customers of UK ISP EE and BT’s Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based home broadband packages are being invited to take part in a new “Faster Broadband Speeds Trial“, which we suspect will involve the use of Openreach’s new 1.2Gbps and 1.8Gbps tiers (both offer 120Mbps upstream). At present, the fastest consumer service available on both providers […]

Network operator Netomnia – supported by UK ISP YouFibre – have today announced that their rollout of 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband has been boosted after they completed their latest fundraise of £230m in committed debt financing from a group of six bank lenders (HSBC UK, ING, NIBC, RBC, Standard Chartered, and UKIB). The operator, which […]