Press Release

A new study from Mobile UK suggests that closing the digital divide could help make adult social care more efficient and effective, as well as saving councils money and reducing stress on the NHS

Mobile UK, the voice of the UK’s main mobile network operators, has published a report entitled Connected Care: How mobile connectivity can help councils overcome the challenges of delivering adult social care. This report highlights the enormous potential that connectivity can offer to the challenges that councils face in delivering adult social care.

While innovation in emerging technologies is forging ahead, and other industries and sectors are taking advantage of mobile connectivity, this new report finds that social care providers and councils are not currently set up to take advantage of improved efficiencies – with only 40% of social care providers currently ‘digitised’.

With councils struggling, both financially and in terms or resources, the opportunities that digital connectivity can offer should be better understood.

New digital devices offer adults in need of in-home living support provision the chance to live independently for longer. For every additional week not in residential care councils can save £648 per person – or £33,700 per year. Additionally, remote monitoring to ensure medication is taken can potentially reduce hospital admissions by 60% – crucial at a time when the NHS is facing its biggest ever challenge. [Government Transformation, 2021].

Digital solutions could also have a material impact on alleviating the social care staffing crisis by supporting better working conditions, easier reporting capabilities, enhanced recruitment processes and upskilling. One example, highlighted in the report in East London, showcased where the training of staff in the use of digital technologies provided opportunities for care workers to access new skills, and resulted in improved job satisfaction and enabled staff to reach their career goals.

This report finds that there is enormous potential for councils to do more to adopt new applications and to ensure the highest quality mobile connectivity is available to them. Local authorities must therefore put infrastructure at the heart of policy making, recognising its foundational status in enabling councils to do more with less while reducing the challenge of adult social care delivery. Mobile UK is advocating for centrally funded Digital Champions to help coordinate and take ownership of these plans

Commenting on the Connected Care report, Chief Executive for Mobile UK, Hamish MacLeod said:

“With the pressure on councils more pronounced than ever and social care one of the biggest challenges they face it is important that the role of digital connectivity and the opportunities it offers are better understood.

“Our report highlights many of these opportunities both to the council and those in need, calling for mobile connectivity to be more heavily integrated into council policy and planning.”

Commenting further, Cancer surgeon and Vodafone Connected Health Ambassador, Professor Shafi Ahmed said:

“Connectivity is key to deliver better, faster care to patients in every part of the health and social care services. Technology can – and I firmly believe, will – completely transform health care across the UK and beyond, making it more equitable, accessible and affordable. But there’s still considerable reluctance to embrace these changes, which is why reports like this are so vital.

“By setting out clearly where the opportunities are, Mobile UK has made it much easier for councils and care providers to understand the impact technology can have on the delivery and quality of social care.”

The full report which contains a foreword by Central London Forward’s Digital Champion Nicola Egan, can be viewed and downloaded here.

Are the UK’s mobile operators doing enough to support vulnerable customers and close the digital divide? Find out more from the operators at this year’s live Connected Britain conference 

Also in the news:
Singtel mulling the sale of cybersecurity firm Trustwave
CityFibre undergoes colourful rebrand
Vodafone offloads Hungarian unit for €1.8bn

The post Connected Care: Digitalisation to transform adult social care first appeared on Total Telecom.

Press Release

Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, unveiled its mid-year cyberthreats report, conducted by Acronis’ Cyber Protection Operation Centers, to provide an in-depth review of the cyberthreat trends the company’s experts are tracking. The report details how ransomware continues to be the number one threat to large and medium-sized businesses, including government organisations, and underlines how over-complexity in IT and infrastructure leads to increased attacks. Nearly half of all reported breaches during the first half of 2022 involved stolen credentials, which enable phishing and ransomware campaigns. Findings underscore the need for more holistic approaches to cybersecurity.

To extract credentials and other sensitive information, cybercriminals use phishing and malicious emails as their preferred infection vectors. Nearly one percent of all emails contain malicious links or files, and more than one-quarter (26.5%) of all emails were delivered to the user’s inbox (not blocked by Microsoft365) and then were removed by Acronis email security.

Moreover, the research reveals how cybercriminals also use malware and target unpatched software vulnerabilities to extract data and hold organisations hostage. Further complicating the cybersecurity threat landscape is the proliferation of attacks on non-traditional entry avenues. Attackers have made cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance systems a priority of late. Successful breaches using these various routes have resulted in the loss of billions of dollars and terabytes of exposed data.

These attacks are able to be launched due to overcomplexity in IT, a common problem throughout businesses as many tech leaders assume more vendors and programs lead to improved security when the inverse is actually true. Increased complexity exposes more surface area and gaps to potential attackers, keeping organisations vulnerable to potentially devastating damage.

“Today’s cyberthreats are constantly evolving and evading traditional security measures,” said Candid Wüest, Acronis VP of Cyber Protection Research. “Organisations of all sizes need a holistic approach to cybersecurity that integrates everything from anti-malware to email-security and vulnerability-assessment capabilities. Cybercriminals are becoming too sophisticated and the results of attacks too dire to leave it to single-layered approaches and point solutions.”

Critical data points reveal complex threat landscape

As reliance on the cloud increases, attackers have homed in on different entryways to cloud-based networks. Cybercriminals increased their focus on Linux operating systems and managed service providers (MSPs) and their network of SMB customers. The threat landscape is shifting, and companies must keep pace.

Ransomware is worsening, even more so than we predicted.

Ransomware gangs, like Conti and Lapsus$, are inflicting serious damage.
The Conti gang demanded $10 million in ransom from the Costa Rican government and has published much of the 672 GB of data it stole.
Lapsus$ stole 1 TB of data and leaked credentials of over 70,000 NVIDIA users. The same gang also stole 30 GB worth of T-Mobile’s source code.
The U.S. Department of State is concerned, offering up to $15 million for information about the leadership and co-conspirators of Conti.

The use of phishing, malicious emails and websites, and malware continues to grow.

Six hundred malicious email campaigns made their way across the internet in the first half of 2022.
58% of the emails were phishing attempts.
Another 28% of those emails featured malware.
The business world is increasingly distributed, and in Q2 2022, an average of 8.3% of endpoints tried to access malicious URLs.

More cybercriminals are focusing on cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms. By exploiting flaws in smart contracts or stealing recovery phrases and passwords with malware or phishing attempts, hackers have wormed their way into crypto wallets and exchanges alike.

Cyberattacks have contributed to a loss of more than $60 billion in DeFi currency since 2012.
$44 billion of that vanished during the last 12 months.

Unpatched vulnerabilities of exposed services is another common infection vector—just ask Kaseya. To that end, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe have emphasised software patches and transparency around publicly submitted vulnerabilities. These patches likely helped stem the tide of 79 new exploits each month. Unpatched vulnerabilities also tie into how overcomplexity is hurting businesses more than helping, as all of these vulnerabilities serve as additional potential points of failure.

Breaches leave financial, SLA distress in their wake

Cybercriminals often demand ransoms or outright steal funds from their targets. But companies do not suffer challenges only to their bottom lines. Attacks often cause downtime and other service-level breaches, impacting a company’s reputation and customer experience.

In 2021 alone, the FBI attributed a total loss of $2.4 billion to business email compromise (BEC).
Cyberattacks caused more than one-third (36%) of downtime in 2021.

The current cybersecurity threat landscape requires a multi-layered solution that combines anti-malware, EDR, DLP, email security, vulnerability assessment, patch management, RMM, and backup capabilities all in one place. The integration of these various components gives companies a better chance of avoiding cyberattacks, mitigating the damage of successful attacks, and retaining data that might have been altered or stolen in the process.

You can download a copy of the full Acronis Mid-Year Cyberthreats Report 2022 here.

 

The post Ransomware is the number-one threat to organisations, claims new report first appeared on Total Telecom.

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite service, fresh from trialling a cheaper capped allowance package in France (here), has now begun offering another new service – initially only in the USA – to customers who are stuck on a waiting list. The catch is that you’ll have to accept a potentially substandard (“Best Efforts“) connection. Customers of […]

Some 11 homes along Heggatt Street in a rural Norfolk (England) community, outside Horstead, have been left without broadband access since 30th July, which began after unspecified damage was caused to Openreach’s (BT) network in the area. Some residents have been forced to drive out of the area just to find adequate connectivity. Openreach has […]

The Mobile UK trade body, which represents Three UK, EE (BT), O2 (VMO2) and Vodafone, has published a new report that highlight how mobile connectivity can help councils overcome the challenges of delivering adult social care. But it’s also pushing for rates relief and easier planning approvals on new masts etc. At present, all of […]

Broadband ISP and mobile giant Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) has today donated £2m to support the Good Things Foundation’s initiatives, which was setup in 2021 to help “disadvantaged people” across the UK get online and gain the digital skills they need. The move makes VMO2 a strategic partner for the group. The foundation does […]

Tell us about your startup
Weaver Labs is a Telecoms startup using blockchain technology to create a network of networks.

We build Cell-Stack, a software product to manage telecoms infrastructure to access it as a service. Simply put, what it does is: aggregates all the telecoms infrastructure that exists in a region in a shared pool of assets, it then opens it up to be consumed in an open marketplace. This software exists in the middle between those who supply telecoms connectivity and those who demand connectivity.

Through Cell-Stack, owners of networks can manage their cloud-based assets as a traditional orchestration tool, which cuts operational costs by acting as a single point of management. For those requiring connectivity, Cell-Stack is a portal where connectivity is offered and deals can be brokered. This “Network as a Service” portal abstracts all the complex elements of the network and instead offers a selection of open assets in the area.

We currently work with network infrastructure owners to help them set up their networks and use Cell-Stack as a management tool to provide connectivity services. We’re very focused on those who want to provide infrastructure as a service, from the public sector to the private sector. This includes local authorities building private networks or neutral host providers and systems integrators in the telecoms space.

What is your USP?
We address the market needs from multiple angles and try to solve the combined problem of telecoms infrastructure: how do we incentivise the community to build networks that allow to expand the technology in industries and cities?

By creating a sustainable model
This Incentivises new players to own infrastructure, reduce deployment & operational costs and monetize infrastructure assets that can be digitised in a single platform.
By diversifying the supply chain. Cell-Stack will be an open and shared marketplace between infrastructure owners, service providers and industries.
“Digitise, aggregate and accelerate” This software will publish, make easy to discover and integrate digital telecom assets to create connectivity, and make networks easy to consume, scale and commercialise.
By using a zero-trust approach to cybersecurity. Compliance-driven approach, driving security by design. We will be delivering connectivity networks based on monitoring, identity, network/device health and authorisation.

Some of the tangible benefits of Cell-Stack are:

As a consumer, you will access telecoms infrastructure to deploy digital services from providers who own or rent their networks.
As a service provider, you will rent telecoms infrastructure so that you don’t have to build your own, and you will have an easy-to-use management tool to organise your telecoms supply chain.
As a supplier, you will have an open platform to offer your telecom assets across all sectors.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
With the number of applications using the network increasing, Communications Service Providers are left with the burden of investing up to 70% of their revenues in deploying new infrastructure. This, alongside the uncertainty in the new business models for CSPs to capture revenues of the new private networks market makes it difficult to build a business case to unlock infrastructure investment. This impacts service provisioning, universal coverage and innovation in various sectors.

Our goal is to distribute the investment for new infrastructure across a larger number of players – not just the CSPs, and increase the number of infrastructure providers in the connectivity markets by facilitating integration of infrastructure owned by different players (i.e., public sector, neutral hosts, private networks). The marketplace aggregates network infrastructure both active (antennas, fibre optics, edge cloud servers) and passive (street furniture, ducting, masts), creating a more competitive, agile and dynamic pool of offerings to the CSPs that want to access the infrastructure as a service and provide network services on top infrastructure that is owned by other players.

In this platform, CSPs belong to a larger ecosystem of participants – we call this the collaborative economy, which favours CSPs by:

Reducing network ownership costs by collaborating: One network can serve multiple customers and can be built out of multiple contributions of digitised telecom assets
Foster “as a Service” commercial models: Making connectivity easy to consume, from a variety of players investing in Telecoms infrastructure
Easy for the market to capture value from connectivity: Open and exposed connectivity is easy to consume by customers, thus generating greater demand and acting as tool for innovation of new services such as AI, Robotics, Smart Devices, Manufacturing

How have you got to your current stage of development?
We’ve done some small rounds of investment but DCMS projects have been crucial to our development and success. The combination of investment with real-life project is key to innovating in the telco space.
Why did you establish the business?

We all come from very different backgrounds with different skill sets. That didn’t prevent us from working together in the 5G Tactile Internet Lab @ King’s College London, back in 2017. Maria was leading the team who delivered the first 5G Test Network in London, as part of a government funded trial where DCMS invested £16m to unlock the benefits of 5G. Anthony was the first hire for this project – Maria wanted to expand the knowledge of the Lab outside of “just Networking” looking at how the Telecoms sector was evolving, it was important to build strong software skills for this project. Together they built an amazing team of about 20 people, where James and Alex joined to work on the software team.
We spent long days and nights chatting about how software architectures were disrupting telco, we also talked a lot about blockchain, crypto and many other geeky stuff. Anthony, James and Alex come from the software and decentralized world, Maria very much telco, so we had a lot to learn from each other. While delivering the 5G project we could see how principles of decentralization could help solve scaling problems in Telecoms (this was back in 2018 – where Telecoms where still very monolithic and resistant to business model changes) and we embarked on a new adventure: we created Weaver Labs, to enable a more efficient use of the telecoms infrastructure by creating a decentralized network of telecoms assets. Our mission is to stimulate collaboration in the telecoms sector and make connectivity easy to consume

What does the future hold for your business?

Our ultimate vision is to create an open public decentralised network that serves as the engine of the marketplace of connectivity. This open public network creates a complete decoupling of infra ownership and service provisioning and breaks siloes of networks and knits together existing telecoms assets.

Our 10-15 year vision is that our Cell-Stack serves is a tool for:

Service providers sell connectivity services over a shared infrastructure model, driven by open architectures. We have contributed to reducing the dependencies of large corporates controlling the value chain.
Verticals, Public Sector (cities) and new connectivity users can scale fast, using Cell-Stack to build hyper-scalable networks, reducing the dependency on Service Providers to invest in infrastructure.

Our 15-20 year vision:

Weaver Labs has created and established a global Peer to Peer network with protocols that have democratised the access to connectivity, reducing barriers to entry to new players in the telecoms sector.
Weaver Labs has contributed to change the supply chain dynamics, removed barriers to infrastructure investment where the demand is met and there is a viable ROI to innovate and invest in new technologies.

HEADQUARTERS: London, United Kingdom
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 9 Full-time
LAST FUNDING TYPE: Seed
WEBSITE https://weaverlabs.io/
FOUNDERS
o Maria Lema
o James Arias
o Anthony Tsiopoulos
o Alex Roditis

You can meet Weaver Labs in the Startup Village at Connected Britain. To book your pass visit www.totaltele.com/connectedbritain

The post Startup Stories: benefitting from a network of networks first appeared on Total Telecom.

BT has reportedly launched a court case against Virgin Media (VMO2), which it is accusing of having migrated customers away from their EE based Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) platform (Virgin Mobile) before an agreement had been concluded. The broadband ISP and mobile giant is reportedly seeking £24.6m in compensation. Just for context. At the […]

Digital infrastructure operator CityFibre has restarted their deployments of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network across Blackpool and Preston in Lancashire (England), which comes after the company ended their local relationship with civil engineering partner Telent in July. Just to recap. The operator originally began their £60m rollout across the seaside town […]

NEWS

The duo say the successful pilot is the first step towards launching commercial slicing services, potentially offering customers a more personalised network experience

This week, Nokia and Safaricom are celebrating an African first with their successful trial of 4G/5G fixed wireless access (FWA) network slicing in Kenya’s Western Region.

The trial took place over a live network, including RAN, transport, and core infrastructure, and demonstrated successful slicing capabilities and continuity over 4G LTE, 5G non-standalone (NSA), and 5G standalone (SA) networks.

The live network featured Nokia’s AirScale 4G/5G base stations, as well as the vendor’s NetAct network management and assurance system and its FastMile 4G/5G customer premises equipment. The slicing functioned on

The trial was also noted as having been ‘multi-vendor’, though no specific additional vendors were named in the announcement itself.

Network slicing has long been touted as one of the crown jewels of the 5G era, potentially allowing operators the to construct virtual data pipelines for individual customers, optimised for their specific requirements.

“Network slicing enables operators the ability to divide a network into multiple virtual slices, which can be optimized for a specific target application or service. The end user of each network slice can then be serviced with different priorities, routing, levels of network performance, and security capabilities. Slices can be managed and deployed in minutes, and each one has key performance indicators used for service assurance,” explained Nokia in a press release.

For the most part, however, 5G slicing has remained out of reach for telcos; while technically possible in a limited form over 4G and 5G NSA, network slicing’s true capabilities can only be realised over 5G SA architecture, which has yet to be rolled out comprehensively in most markets.

For Safaricom, who only launched 5G services in Kenya in March last year, commercialising 5G network slicing will still be a long way off, but this trial nonetheless represents a promising step forward for the nascent technology.

“We are proud to have hosted Africa’s first successful pilot of 4G/5G FWA slicing on our network and looking forward to tailoring our service offerings to individual customers and industries, to meet their needs for high-speed connectivity precisely and without unnecessary cost,” said James Maitai, Network Director at Safaricom.

The operator’s interest in 5G network slicing is well founded. According to a recent study from ABI Research, the global 5G slicing revenue is expected to grow from $309 million in 2022 to around $24 billion by 2028. The report even suggested that 5G network slicing could replace a “a sizable part” of the private 5G market – another rapidly growing market segment for modern telcos – though warned that telcos’ commercial models may need to adapt to achieve maximum benefit.

“A sizable part of this market can be converted to 5G slicing. But first, the industry should address challenges associated with technology and commercial models. On the latter, consumers’ and enterprises’ appetite to pay premium connectivity prices for deterministic and tailored connectivity services remains to be determined,” said ABI’s 5G core and edge networks senior analyst, Don Alusha. “Furthermore, there are ongoing industry discussions on whether the value that comes from 5G slicing can exceed the cost required to put together the underlying slicing ecosystem.”

Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscribe to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here

Also in the news:
Singtel mulling the sale of cybersecurity firm Trustwave
CityFibre undergoes colourful rebrand
Vodafone offloads Hungarian unit for €1.8bn

The post Nokia and Safaricom laud Africa’s first FWA 5G slicing first appeared on Total Telecom.