City-focused broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which aims to cover 2 million UK premises with their full fibre (FTTP / FTTB) network by the end of 2023 (they’ve almost done half of that), has just discounted their top 1Gbps (symmetric speed) package to just £25 per month on their 24-month terms (£60 thereafter). The new Black Friday […]

The UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has unveiled the winners of their 24th annual 2022 internet industry and broadband awards, which among other things saw B4RN take home the award for “Best Rural ISP” (second year running), while Brsk was named as the best infrastructure provider with under 100,000 premises. The award categories have […]

Network builder and rural ISP County Broadband has today announced 9 new villages, this time in Essex (England), where local homes and businesses will now be able to access their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which is also being deployed across parts of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. The areas being announced today have already started […]

The Consumer Pricing Bill (CPB), which seeks to “prohibit the practice of offering preferential pricing to new customers compared to existing customers“, will today get its second reading in the House of Commons. The Private Members Bill (PMB) could, if passed, effectively prevent first term discounts on broadband ISP and mobile packages. At present new […]

New customers thinking of taking out one of EE’s fibre-based home broadband packages (FTTC and FTTP) may like to know that the ISP has just introduced a series of new Black Friday discounts (e.g. 900Mbps at £42 per month with free setup for 24-months), which will be available to take until 8th December 2022. All […]

News

The investment will expand their existing LD7 and LD8 sites in London, as well as establishing a new MA5 datacentre in Manchester

This week, Equinix has announced the investment of a further £179 million into its UK-based data centres, aiming to meet the country’s rapidly growing data demand.

More specifically, these funds will be used to expand the company’s existing LD7 and LD8 data centres, located in Slough and London Docklands, respectively, and opening a new datacentre, MA5, in Manchester.

“The location of these data centres complements the growth of the UK’s two biggest cities. Manchester is one of Europe’s fastest growing business centres for technology and media, while London is a long-established financial centre of the world. Despite Brexit-born uncertainty, there are many reasons to be optimistic about digital transformation and technology investment in the UK,” explained Russell Poole, Managing Director for Equinix UK.

Explaining the motivation for the investment, the company said that despite the difficult global economic climate, businesses around the world are continuing to prioritise digitalisation, particularly the adoption of hybrid multicloud services. As such, additional investment is needed to ensure that the UK data centre sector is robust, allowing businesses to compete on a global scale.

According Equinix, the investment will create “multiple career opportunities”, with the company noting a number of programmes it has underway aiming at attracting female talent to the IT and tech industry.

In total, the new expansions will bring the digital infrastructure company’s total investment in the UK to over £1 billion.

In related news, just last week Equinix announced its participation in the Gaia-X project, an initiative aimed at building a framework for open IT standards and APIs to support decentralised, federated digital infrastructure. In short, to enable European service providers to interoperate and exchange data more smoothly via players like Equinix.

How is new digital infrastructure changing the economic landscape in the UK? Join the telecoms industry and local stakeholders at the upcoming Connected North conference in Manchester

Also in the news:
SKT takes its Ifland metaverse platform global
CMA probes Apple and Google over browser “duopoly”
Vodacom launches National Relay Service to boost digital inclusion

The post Equinix expands UK data centre footprint with £179m investment first appeared on Total Telecom.

News

KT and LG Uplus will have their licences cancelled, while SK Telecom will have their licence term shortened by six months

South Korea is rightly looked to as a world leader in many fields of technology and, for the most part, 5G is no exception.

However, when it comes to mmWave 5G, results in the country have been so disappointing that the government is now moving to remove some of the telcos’ licences altogether.

A recent audit by the Ministry of Science and IT (MSIT) found that all three of the nation’s mobile operators – SK Telecom (SKT), KT, and LG Uplus – have failed to meet their obligations with regards to their mmWave spectrum licences.

According to the Ministry, the operators “did not meet even the minimum requirements for the 28-gigahertz band infrastructure”, having failed to invest sufficiently in rolling out the technology.

The South Korean telcos were first awarded the five-year 28GHz spectrum licences back in 2018, paying roughly $463.7 million for the privilege. As part of the conditions attached to the licences, the operators were obligated to deploy 15,000 base stations each by 2021.

The audit showed, however, that KT had deployed just 1,586 base stations by April this year, while LG Uplus had deployed 1,868, and SKT 1,605.

Considering these deployment figures alongside other licencing criteria, such as network performance and plans for further Deployments, the Ministry judged both KT and LG Uplus to have failed to reach the minimum requirements to retain their licences. As such, the Ministry will be reclaiming both licences.

The revoked licences will be reauctioned, with the government suggesting they will introduce a number of incentives to drive interest from potential suitors. Whether KT and LG Uplus will bid to regain their licences remains to be seen but is unlikely unless service obligations are reduced.

SKT, on the other hand, was deemed to have just barely exceeded the minimum requirements, hence their licence will not be revoked but rather punitively reduced in length by six months.

The Ministry strongly urged SKT to accelerate its deployment efforts, noting that they will still have to deploy the full 15,000 base stations by May 2023.

For the South Korean government, the operators’ lack of interest in mmWave is somewhat concerning.

mmWave spectrum is set to be a mainstay of 6G, the next generation of mobile technology that is set to mature around 2030. The government fears that, without an adequate deployment of mmWave infrastructure over the coming years, the nation will fall behind in the race to 6G supremacy.

“The relative immaturity of the domestic 28-gigahertz bandwidth ecosystem compared to other countries may undermine Korea’s foothold as the leading player in the telecom sector, and therefore is very worrisome,” said the Ministry.

‘Other countries’ here refers to the likes of the US, Japan, and China, all of which have been rolling out mmWave infrastructure at scale for the past two years.

But for the South Korean telcos themselves, mmWave has proved far less inviting. Despite offering far greater data speeds than the more widely used mid-band 5G spectrum, its relatively short propagation range makes it more expensive to deploy. Couple this with the fact that mmWave 5G is not compatible with existing consumer smartphones and you have a relatively niche service proposition, typically limited to enterprise use cases, like smart factories.

For consumers, on the other hand, most of the operators’ commercial 5G traffic currently flows over their 3.5 GHz spectrum, which is not only compatible with existing mobile devices but provides an appealing balance of high speeds and coverage distance.

This is the band where operators have been focussing their investment, with recent reports suggesting that there are over 25 million 5G subscribers in South Korea, accounting for roughly a third of total mobile subscriptions.

Also in the news:
SKT takes its Ifland metaverse platform global
CMA probes Apple and Google over browser “duopoly”
Vodacom launches National Relay Service to boost digital inclusion

The post “Very worrisome”: South Korean govt revokes mmWave 5G licences first appeared on Total Telecom.

Sky (Sky Broadband, Sky TV) has today announced that their Sky Mobile service, which is an O2 (VMO2) powered Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), has reached the major milestone of 3 million customers and is now the “fastest growing mobile provider in the UK“. On the surface, Sky Mobile’s plans might not seem as attractive […]

The ITU and United Nations (UN) Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development has recently issued their annual progress update on getting the world connected to affordable broadband ISP connectivity, which among other things finds that 2.7 billion people have yet to even access the internet. The commission has long set a series of targets to assist […]

VIEWPOINT

5G is emerging as the fastest generation ever deployed, with more than 200 5G networks and three million base stations worldwide, several of them in China, South Korea and the US.

Several industry leaders discussed the growing 5G ecosystem at a recent panel discussion organized by Euronews. Laurent Leboucher, the Chief Technical Officer of French Telecom’s giant Orange, Dr. Philip Song, the Chief Marketing Officer at Huawei Carrier Business Group, and Alex Sinclair, the Chief Technical Officer at GSMA participated in the discussion.

However, Europe needs to catch up in 5G deployments. As of now, there are 108 live networks in 34 markets in Europe. “The first challenge that we face is, of course, access to spectrum. In Europe, the spectrum is allocated to operators in each country. So it means that there is a specific process, and there is a specific timeline for each country. However, not all governments have yet granted the license to do it, but it will come,” says Laurent Leboucher of Orange. Further, he added that access to a full range of 5G devices is also a challenge in Europe.

However, the global 5G ecosystem is vibrant, with more and more telcos deploying 5G. “5G was launched three years ago and it has seen considerable growth. By the end of October, more than 230 operators have launched commercial 5G services. Over the past three years, the world’s top 20 operators by the number of 5G stations already saw their average revenue per user increase by more than 10%,” says Dr Philip Song of Huawei.

While the technology offers several innovative use cases, one of the crucial benefits for the operator is that it helps them increase the mobile network’s capacity. “if we want to cope with the increase in usage that we experience with networks, we definitely had to deploy 5G. Orange 5G customer experience is already double what a 4G customer or user can experience in terms of bandwidth. It means that in all cases, it’s more than 200 Mbit/s per user in cities,” says Laurent. However, the second phase of the technology will bring in newer use cases like XR, VR and connected cars, among others.

5G: Transformative Impact on Enterprises and Consumers

5G promises to change the way enterprises work. The combination of ultra-high-speed and extremely low latency will enable several new use cases for different industry verticals. It is helping companies digitally transform their operations and use automation for improved operational efficiency.

“5G has already created great value for the industry in the past three years. The industries are embracing 5G and using it as a tool for the digital transformation. We believe 5GtoB can make businesses smarter, greener and more secure and more efficient,” says Philip. For instance, it has been deployed in mines in South Africa to enable remote operations and improve the workers’ security and working conditions.

Right from operating machines to automated robotic systems to augmented reality in the maintenance of systems, we are only limited by our imagination where 5G use cases are concerned. 5G use cases promise to help companies improve productivity and efficiency. Different 5G Private Networks deployment models will emerge in different geographies and in line with the requirements of different industry verticals.

“Both, network slicing and 5G private networks will coexist. While most of the requirements can be met by public networks, enterprises will also go for a dedicated private network, which they can also do in partnership with operators, or in some countries, they can do it themselves,” says Alex Sinclair of GSMA.

5G allows service providers to offer innovative use cases, like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Connected Cars and remote surgery, among others, to consumers to grow their revenue.

“Three factors are most critical to the 5G business department. More entry-level 5G devices, better network experience and innovative content and applications. When it comes to innovative content and applications, it’s agreed that new videos, cloud gaming, and AR are the top 3 killer services. So nearly around 40% of the 5G operators around the world have already provided value-added 5G services, in addition to their original packages,” explained Dr Philip Song of Huawei. Besides videos, immersive experience of sports-related events

Ensuring 5G Coverage Across Europe 

5G is a transformative technology which will have a massive social and economic impact. To ensure that everybody is able to benefit from it, European Union has set a goal of getting uninterrupted 5G coverage across all urban areas and major transport routes by 2025.

“The EU adopted a 5G Action Plan for Europe in 2016 to ensure good deployment of 5G infrastructure across Europe. The objective was to make sure at first that 5G was deployed in all European states by 2020, at least launching 5G, and barring a few exceptions, we do have 5G almost everywhere. So we are on track to have 5G coverage across all urban areas and major transport routes by 2025,” says Laurent of Orange.

The coverage can be enhanced by deploying more base stations, elaborated Dr Philip Song of Huawei.

“If we can deploy more base stations, especially along the motorway, the coverage can be guaranteed. We need some innovative software or features to enhance the coverage. 5G is the best solution because it can provide 10 times the capacity and huge connectivity to the consumers,” says Dr Philip Song.

Using 5G to Enhance Energy Efficiency  

A major concern faced by the telcos now is that they need to adopt sustainable and environment-friendly practices. 5G helps in this as it is a more energy-efficient technology when compared with previous standards.

5G networks are about ten times more energy efficient than 4G networks and provide a better user experience while supporting a higher density of connections. While meeting the exact data service requirements, 5G networks consume less energy than 4G networks and can support larger bandwidth and more data applications. With 5G, more activities can be carried out online, which also can reduce carbon emissions.

“As an ICT infrastructure provider, Huawei has been focusing on environmental protections for quite a while through our product and solution innovations. We make the biggest impact by improving the energy efficiency of our customer’s networks and reducing their carbon emissions,” says Dr Philip Song of Huawei. “Huawei also follows a “More Bits, Less Watts” strategy, which helps us develop a set of green indicators and a three-layer green solution. These indicators and solutions can help the carriers improve their networks’ energy efficiency,” he added.

European service providers like Orange believe 5G is helping industries reduce carbon emissions. “It’s also even more important to use and leverage 5G to help other companies to manage in a better way scarce resources, but also to manage and consume less energy, because we will leverage more data, we will be smarter. Because of the digital infrastructure that we can provide, we can help other industries to reduce their own impact,” says Laurent of Orange.

Looking ahead 

Now that 5G development has gained momentum, what lies ahead for the technology? “We believe 5G will naturally evolve to 5.5G in 2025, and it will enable a much better experience for the customers and open business opportunities for the operators,” says Philip. “All the industry players, including the world-leading operators, are already moving faster towards 5.5G. We can see this in the improvement to the standards, spectrum, industrial value chain, and also ecosystem as well,” he added. 5.5G promises to deliver a tenfold increase in user experience, connectivity and ten times more energy efficiency.

Further, the future for European markets involves movement towards 5G Standalone (5G SA) and greater use of network slicing, which will allow service providers to provide more specific networks that would address some key requirements such as security, local data processing, and latency. Besides, going forward, immersive applications will become more popular, which will lead to the development of new use cases, including metaverse and metaverse experiences.

“For Europe, the most important thing is that 5G is deployed at reasonable levels everywhere, which in itself will make such a big difference to European citizens. It’s not always about the highest throughput and the lowest latency, making sure that everybody has access to a very good level of broadband is important,” says Alex Sinclair of GSMA.

The post How is Europe growing 5G ecosystem? first appeared on Total Telecom.