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Press Release 

Constant innovation in AI Compute Service: Unleashing powerful compute in the intelligent era. 

This year, Huawei Cloud announced its AI Compute Service powered by CloudMatrix384. The specifications of the Huawei CloudMatrix supernode will be upgraded from 384 cards to 8,192 cards. The supernodes can support a hyperscale cluster running on 500,000 to 1 million cards, thus providing robust AI compute, an invaluable resource in the intelligent era. Huawei Cloud also announced innovative memory storage with its Elastic Memory Service (EMS), which achieved an industry first by expanding video RAM with memory. This drastically reduces the latency of multi-round conversations on foundation models, greatly improving user experience. 

With rapidly increasing demand for AI compute, traditional data centers are no longer sufficient to serve as efficient AI infrastructure. To support AI workloads, the power consumption of a single cabinet will need to be upgraded from 10 kW to 70 kW, and possibly as high as 200 kW, and heat dissipation will need to shift from air cooling to full liquid cooling. Huawei Cloud has deployed fully liquid-cooled AI data centers in China’s Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, and Anhui. These AI data centers support 80 kW heat dissipation per cabinet, reduce power usage effectiveness (PUE) to 1.1, and offer AI-enabled O&M. This means enterprises do not need to reconstruct traditional data centers or build new ones. Instead, they require only a pair of optical fibers in order to connect to the data center and access efficient AI compute, as well as full-stack dedicated AI cloud services, on Huawei Cloud. 

Zhang Ping’an pointed out that Huawei Cloud’s AI Token Service abstracts away the underlying technical complexity and directly provides users with the final AI computing results. This allows users to utilize the inference computing power in the most efficient way possible. The CloudMatrix384 supernode realizes the full pooling of compute, memory, and storage resources, decouples compute tasks, storage tasks, and AI expert systems, and converts serial tasks into distributed parallel tasks, greatly improving the inference performance of the system. In scenarios involving inference tasks with different latency requirements, such as online, nearline, and offline inference, CloudMatrix384 delivers an average inference performance per card that is 3 to 4 times that of H20. 

At the conference, Zhang Ping’an announced the official launch of the AI Token Service powered by CloudMatrix384. The service delivers superior performance, service, and quality to customers. 

As of now, the number of customers worldwide using Huawei Cloud’s AI Compute Service has increased from 321 in 2024 to this year’s 1,805. Qihoo 360’s Nano Search has used the CloudMatrix384-powered token inference service to process tens of thousands of content generation requests every day.  

Zhang Ping’an noted that Huawei Cloud will continue to advance software-hardware synergy and architecture innovation, so as to build cloud services that constantly create value for their customers and always keep them up-to-date with the latest technologies. In addition, Huawei Cloud will invest more resources into AI and computing, in order to cultivate the fertile ground on which different industries’ applications can run smoother and better. In the AI era, Huawei Cloud is committed to pursuing innovation in AI computing power and technologies, helping every customer become an AI pioneer in their industry. 

Zhang Ping’an, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and CEO of Huawei Cloud 

Tackling challenges head-on: Helping enterprises build their own models 

Huawei Cloud has been honing its Pangu Models by diving into industry-specific scenarios, and has worked with its customers to tackle their most pressing challenges head-on, reimagining what is possible in these industries. Huawei uses openPangu to provide best practices for AI training and inference, making it easier for developers to efficiently use AI computing power. Zhang Ping’an noted that, at the same time, Huawei is developing the closed-source Pangu Model. Huawei will continually increase investment in Pangu Models, constantly study industry scenarios to better understand customer requirements, and support customers in developing their own industry-specific models, thus accelerating intelligent transformation across industries. 

To better align the incremental training of models with enterprise scenarios, Huawei Cloud integrates industry know-how into ModelArts, a one-stop AI development platform. ModelArts provides knowledge regarding the optimal data ratios for industry tasks, the optimal configurations for incremental training, and a system for assessing model effectiveness and accuracy. 

Zhang Ping’an also pointed out that data quality determines model quality. Huawei Cloud uses the DataArts data governance pipeline to automatically extract multi-modal data semantics and build converged knowledge graphs that form a unified knowledge lake for enterprises. This provides comprehensive, rich, and consistent business corpuses for large model pre-training. In addition, Huawei Cloud provides one-stop toolchains to quickly generate high-quality tuning datasets with chains of thought (CoT) for model post-training. 

China Southern Airlines uses the Pangu Model’s cross-modal prediction technology to predict passenger traffic and average ticket prices over an 18-month period. Prediction accuracy reaches 90%, significantly improving the airline’s operating revenue. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) has developed the Agricultural Scientific Discovery Model based on the Pangu foundation model and Pangu Scientific Computing Model. This model is trained using massive amounts of agricultural knowledge and tens of billions of biological data entries, shortening the R&D cycle by more than 50%. 

Pangu Models have been applied in more than 500 scenarios across over 30 industries. They have played a significant role in fields like government services, finance, manufacturing, healthcare, coal mining, steel, railways, autonomous driving, and meteorology. 

Moving beyond terminals: Enabling infinite intelligence evolution on the cloud 

This year, Huawei Cloud launched the CloudRobo Embodied AI Platform, which deploys complex algorithms and intelligent logic on the cloud to realize more lightweight robots. By taking advantage of the massive computing power and advanced AI models on the cloud, the platform makes robot execution more intelligent. Cloud intelligence overcomes the limitations that have been holding robots back, making them applicable to more scenarios. 

In the development phase, CloudRobo uses a cloud-based, embodied AI training data generation platform to automatically generate operation trajectories for different poses, textures, and lighting conditions, greatly enriching data diversity and increasing the synthetic data scale by thousands of times. This not only greatly reduces data collection costs, but effectively improves the generalization capability of models. CloudRobo also provides cloud-based environment perception, global planning, and autonomous execution capabilities, achieving a task execution accuracy exceeding 90%. With the support of CloudRobo, the National and Local Co-Built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center in Shanghai uses data collected from real machines alongside synthetic data to train robots, improving the overall sorting success rates of robots in multiple scenarios to over 90%, which is an industry-leading success rate so far. 

To build a unified, open, and secure communication channel between robots and the cloud, Huawei Cloud has launched the Robot to Cloud (R2C) Protocol, which realizes the collaborative thinking and efficient execution of AI agents. As of today, national standards are in progress regarding data collection, data generation, and communication interfaces around the R2C Protocol. During his keynote speech, Zhang Ping’an announced that the first 20 partners of the R2C Protocol were officially onboard, including Hualong, Flexiv, Yijiahe, and Avant Robotics. Huawei Cloud works alongside its partners to develop cloud-based integrated robot solutions based on the R2C Protocol in fields such as manufacturing, logistics, inspection, and healthcare. 

Kunpeng Cloud Services: Empowering industry innovation with software-hardware synergy and an open ecosystem 

One of Huawei Cloud‘s key strategies is to develop Kunpeng-powered ARM cloud services that deliver performance, security, and reliability. In the past year, the number of Kunpeng compute cores on Huawei Cloud has increased from 9 million to 15 million, an increase of 67%. In addition, the Kunpeng platform has been continuously improved to support compatibility with mainstream software, and has also been adapted to more than 25,000 applications. The Kunpeng platform provides solid support for Kunpeng Cloud Services to be applied to even more general-computing scenarios, in addition to transcoding, databases, web applications, and cloud phones. 

GaussDB: Building efficient, reliable data foundations based on supernodes and full pooling

Based on general-purpose computing supernodes, Huawei Cloud’s GaussDB databases realize the layered pooling of compute, memory, and storage resources, and allow multi-read and multi-write on any node at the same time, breaking free from the restrictions of the traditional architecture where only the primary node supports data read/write. GaussDB databases also support dynamic load scheduling, greatly enhancing the performance of concurrent transaction processing. A GaussDB cluster deployed based on computing supernodes can process 5.4 million transactions per minute, marking a 2.9-fold performance increase over non-supernode clusters. 

All-scenario distributed cloud: Ubiquitous and best possible compute with local access

Huawei Cloud has built a distributed cloud solution covering all scenarios, including CloudOcean, CloudSea, CloudLake, and CloudPond. This covers central regions, hotspot areas, and edge sites, bringing consistent Huawei Cloud experience to wherever customers’ business is located. Huawei Cloud and FAW-Volkswagen have worked together to successfully implement China’s first automotive factory based on the distributed cloud solution. The solution overcomes geographical constraints and realizes comprehensive, in-depth collaboration between the HQ and six factories spread across five cities, enabling seamless data flow and intelligent manufacturing. 

Building an easy-to-use, effective, and open platform for developing and running agents

AI agents are transforming into a new application paradigm in the AI era. With this in mind, Huawei Cloud has launched Versatile, an enterprise-grade agent platform. It aims to serve as an easy-to-use, effective, and open platform for developing and running AI agents. With this platform, customers will be better equipped to quickly develop AI agents that suit their application scenarios. 

Many nodes are included in the agent development process, involving highly complex businesses. Based on Versatile, users simply need to prepare and enter business description documents and flowcharts. After simple confirmation, the agent can be generated in two steps, greatly enhancing generation efficiency. Agents automatically invoke numerous programs when they are working, causing severe traffic jitters. Versatile also uses system innovations such as high-performance sandbox and full-memory cache to reduce end-to-end response latency within businesses by more than 40%, enabling agents to run stably and efficiently. 

Continuous innovation: Empowering customers to succeed in global markets

As industries worldwide rush to embrace digital and intelligent transformation, Huawei Cloud consistently pursues technological innovation as its core driving force and is committed to providing stable, efficient, and secure cloud services for global customers. 

Charles Yang, Senior Vice President of Huawei and President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, delivered a keynote speech regarding this topic. He highlighted the fact that enterprises are facing numerous complex challenges in the digital intelligence era. With this in mind, Huawei Cloud identifies its core positioning and adheres to this positioning. Huawei Cloud provides a holistic support system featuring “one global cloud infrastructure and two engines – one with data and one with AI” for its global customers. 

The first of these is KooVerse, a global cloud infrastructure that offers customers elastic cloud services. Second are data enablement services, which efficiently supply data and unleash data value. Third is a one-stop AI development platform that helps enterprises build AI-native applications and innovate with greater ease. Finally, Huawei Cloud brings together the best practices in global digital and intelligent transformation, and provides them through cloud services to help more customers succeed. 

Charles Yang, Senior Vice President of Huawei and President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service 

DeFacto, a top fast fashion retailer in Türkiye, faces a traffic surge of more than 10 times during each promotional season, and its traditional IDC architecture struggled to cope with this surge. DeFacto therefore turned to Huawei Cloud’s container service, which can automatically scale up 4,000 pods within 30 seconds, allowing the company to easily cope with traffic spikes. 

Based on Huawei Cloud’s DWS, Neogrid, Brazil’s largest data intelligence and technology company, migrated and integrated its data that was scattered across multiple platforms, improving data integration efficiency by 40% and data analysis efficiency by 50%. Today, this gives Neogrid’s customers the ability to obtain the day’s data before the end of work and therefore make business decisions earlier. 

Based on the powerful generalization capability of Huawei Cloud’s Pangu Prediction Model on industrial time-series data, Wanhua Chemical, a global leader in the chemical industry, has accurately captured data on more than 2,000 key devices, allowing them to transform their reactive maintenance model into predictive maintenance. Model prediction accuracy has improved from 70% to 90%, and anomaly identification efficiency has increased by 10%. 

Huawei worked with partners such as China Unicom to build “One Cloud, One Network, One Platform” for Changan Automobile, driving flexible manufacturing with data. Changan Automobile uses 5G and IoT to connect 12,000 devices, allowing it to interconnect data from different domains. Based on the comprehensive data services of Huawei Cloud, Changan has built a unified data platform. This platform breaks apart the data silos, enables efficient production operations, and shortens order delivery lead time from 21 days to 15 days. 

In addition to providing end-to-end service capabilities that span the cloud foundation, technology enablement toolchains, and experiences, Huawei Cloud provides tailored consulting and professional services, as well as automation tools and platforms for enterprises’ digital and intelligent transformation. 

Charles Yang expressed that digital and intelligent transformation can never be achieved by one player in a single move. Rather, it requires close, continuous collaboration throughout the entire journey. With its technologies, experiences, and services, Huawei Cloud is ready to work with global enterprises at every step of their transformation journeys. 

HUAWEI CONNECT 2025 runs from September 18 to 20 at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center and Shanghai Expo Center. This year, the event explores the theme of “All Intelligence” and delved into AI across three dimensions: strategy, technology, and ecosystems. This involved an in-depth look at Huawei’s latest strategic initiatives, and the unveiling of a series of all-new digital and intelligent infrastructure products, scenario-specific solutions for industries, and development tools. 

In addition to keynote speeches given at the event, Huawei Cloud brought a variety of agendas, such as summit forums and roundtables. Huawei Cloud also works with customers and partners to exhibit a wide array of innovative technologies and practices in fields such as cloud infrastructure, large models, databases, AI agents, and embodied AI, demonstrating how technology can facilitate the digital and intelligent transformation of industries. 

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

City-focused broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which claims to have deployed their full fibre (FTTP/B) network to cover 1.9 million UK premises, is reportedly seeking more funding to keep their network expansion going. But their latest accounts to the end of 2024 show they also generated maiden adjusted earnings of £2.7m in 2024 (vs a loss of £4.7m in 2023) and gross profit rose 20% to £87m.

The operator, which is currently home to 400,000 active subscribers (9th Jun 2025) and at the start of 2025 suffered another round of redundancies (here), is currently going through a strategic shift that has seen their own network build switch to focus more on commercialisation. On top of that, they’re also working toward reaching the rest of the UK by harnessing Openreach’s growing national FTTP network – here (due to start becoming available from early 2026).

The big news today is that the provider will this week release their audited results for the year ended 31st December 2024 and, as part of that, they’ve today published their own somewhat sanitised preview (i.e. the accounts aren’t yet available via Companies House and those will inevitably contain a lot more detail).

The results reveal that Hyperoptic invested £173m into its full fibre infrastructure during the year, enabling further geographic expansion and supporting future growth. But the official announcement doesn’t mention that the operator’s statutory pre-tax losses for the year stood at £144m, although this is only ever so slightly above the £142m they reported for 2023.

Hyperoptic’s Results Highlights

➤ Revenue increased by 22% to £114 million

➤ Customer base grew by 20% to 374,000 subscribers

➤ Network reach expanded to 1.9 million homes passed

➤ Gross profit rose 20% to £87 million

➤ EBITDAi increased significantly to £24 million

➤ Secured additional funding commitments to support ongoing investment in geographic expansion and growth

➤ Achieved a Trustpilot rating of “Excellent”, with over 28,000 five-star reviews in 2024

➤ Named Which? Great Value Provider in March 2024

Social and environmental responsibility

➤ Over 37% of the senior leadership team consisting of women

➤ Providing affordable social tariffs and free broadband to community hubs

➤ Reducing CO₂ emissions intensity per subscriber by 23%

➤ Expanding partnerships with councils, social housing providers, and digital inclusion charities

In addition to today’s results, Hyperoptic also announced the appointment of Sam Horrocks as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). With more than 25 years’ experience in senior finance roles at Virgin Media, Vodafone, Inmarsat and most recently as deputy CFO at Travelport, Sam strengthens Hyperoptic’s leadership team as the company scales its operations and continues to expand across the UK.

Breaking news.. more to follow..

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

Alternative rural UK broadband ISP Airband, which has built a full fibre (FTTP) and wireless (FWA) network that covers parts of Wales and South West England, has shared a copy of their latest group accounts with ISPreview and revealed that they expect to reach EBITDA positivity in 2028. But the provider is still facing a “material uncertainty” over its funding.

Just to put this into some context. Airband recently went through a period of restructuring, which resulted in a fair few jobs losses and a switch to focus on commercialising their existing network (as opposed to new infrastructure build). The situation reflected some of the same pressures as other operators have been facing (e.g. high interest rates, rising build costs and strong competition).

In terms of the provider’s current network reach, the new accounts, which aren’t yet public, don’t seem to provide any updated figures. But Airband has previously said that their UK broadband network now spanned “more than 440,000 premises in over 200 communities across 7 counties“ (here), which we were told breaks down as being 175,000 premises via “fibre” (FTTP) and 265,000 premises via wireless (FWA) – all Ready for Service. The operator did, however, inform ISPreview that they expected to end 2025 with 30,000 customers.

The new accounts for Airband Topco Limited typically start off by saying that they “present a compelling picture of a business that has not only weathered structural change but has emerged from it stronger, more focused, and better positioned for growth“. The operator then points to how the recent restructuring has resulted in a “reduction of legacy cost structures, simplification of internal processes, and consolidation of project delivery teams” that has delivered a “leaner and more agile organisation“.

The operator now promises to be sharply focused on accelerating the commercialisation of its business to “drive sustainable revenue growth” and work towards achieving EBITDA (i.e. earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) positivity by 2028. Take note that while such a result, once achieved, would indicate that a company’s core operations are starting to become profitable (banks use this to help assess whether a company is able to pay off its debts), EBITDA itself doesn’t fully consider everything and there’s still a long road ahead.

Speaking of which, the group’s annual revenues to December 2024 increased by 37% of £6,667,000, while their total staffing count fell from 451 to 285. The operating loss increased to -£47.23m (2023: -£37.06m), which was due to “increased investment in staff to drive the growth of the organisation and increased depreciation of the growing network“. Otherwise, the company reported total assets of £179.81m and total liabilities of -£224.92m.

Despite the positive post-restructuring progress, Airband’s accounts do make reference to a “material uncertainty” that exists over the group’s ability to fund itself after a key deadline passed on 1st September 2025.

Airband’s Funding Statement

After the year end, to support the revised strategy the shareholders extended the convertible loan facility by a further £27.8 million (and further funding at the option of the shareholder). The convertible loan facilities drawn down as at the date of approval of the financial statements of £132.9 million are in place until 27 March 2027 and are secured by fixed and floating charges over the subsidiary’s assets.

The Group has prepared a cashflow forecast, including all subsidiary undertakings for a period of 12 months from the date of approval of these financial statements. The revised funding requirement of the business exceeds the current available facilities and new funding will be required from 1 September 2025. The base forecast shows the available convertible loans provide the cash required by the Group to operate and pay its debts as they fall due for payment in the period to 31 August 2025.

The Directors are confident that the operating expenditure can be managed within the funds available to 31 August 2025 and that further funding will be secured to allow the Group and Company to continue in operation for at least until 18 July 2026. On this basis, the Directors have concluded that it is reasonable to assume the Group and Company are able to adequately fund its operations for the foreseeable future, being 12 months from the date of approval of these financial statements.

As at the date of approval of these financial statements, as further funding required by the Group and Company from 1 September 2025 has not been identified and secured, including any additional funding from its major shareholder which may be needed in the period to 30 September 2026 has not been guaranteed. The Directors consider that these events and conditions indicate that there is a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt about the Group’s and Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. The financial statements do not include the adjustments that would be necessary if the Group and Company are unable to continue as a going concern.

The caveat above is that Airband has made similar statements in past accounts and they usually do manage to find solutions, eventually. So, while the language may sound worrying, it’s worth not taking this too much at face value because the operator’s recent improvements suggest they may yet be able to find a solution for the next year.

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Set-top-box manufacturer Humax appears to be preparing to launch its first box with video recording capabilities for the new broadband-based live TV streaming service Freely, which is supported by several of the major UK TV broadcasters (BBC, ITV etc.) and is an evolution – not yet a full replacement – of the existing Freeview service (inc. Freeview Play and Freesat).

Freely has been slowly improving their device support since the service first went live in April 2024 (here) and recently confirmed plans to launch on Netgem’s new streaming TV box during Q4 2025 (here); such boxes are typically bundled by broadband ISPs like Brsk, TalkTalk, CommunityFibre, Wightfibre and others. The BBC are also understood to be considering the launch of a streaming box (here).

However, Freely’s adoption is likely to remain limited until the service arrives on popular streaming devices from Amazon, Google and Roku, but at present there’s no clear indication of whether or even when this will happen. In the meantime, progress is still being made and a number of electrical retailers (examples here, here and here) recently started listing the existence of a new device – the Humax FHR-6000T – “Freely PVR Recordable Set Top Box“.

The new 4K (UltraHD) supporting box doesn’t yet appear to be listed on Humax’s website, but the retailers indicate that it will cost £249 and “stands out as the very first Freely PVR (personal video recorder) set top box, allowing recording of up to four channels simultaneously on a single screen” (max recording time of 1000 hours). The box will also offer connectivity via HDMI 2.1 and USB ports, as well as WiFi capability, Ethernet (LAN), SPDIF (optical audio), RF out and RF in.

The box supports popular TV services / apps like BBC iPlayer, ITVX, C4, C5 and allows Remote Record (Schedule on the Go). The kit, which also has the ability to pause live TV, comes with a 1-year warranty (extendable to 2 years upon registration), weighs a hefty 1.7kg and is sized as follows: H48 x W280 x D200 mm.

However, there’s currently little to no other information on how this box will go about Freely’s integration, and a sizeable question mark remains over the limitations of its video recording capabilities (i.e. does this really extend to content delivered via Freely or only via something like aerial-based Freeview signals).

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

In recent weeks ISPreview has started to see more indications that customers of UK ISP Virgin Media (O2), particularly those covered by their XGS-PON based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband lines (either via coax upgrades or nexfibre), may soon see a package refresh and possibly even the launch of a 5000Mbps (5Gbps) symmetric speed tier.

A fair bit of time has passed since Virgin Media launched their fastest 2Gbps package to consumers in February 2024 (here) and the market has already moved on, with quite a few ISPs on alternative networks now offering even faster multi-gigabit broadband tiers.

For example, some operators like Netomnia (YouFibre) and B4RN have had 7-10Gbps class packages for a while, while CityFibre made a 5.5Gbps tier available in June 2025 (here) and even Openreach are looking to trial speeds of up to 8.5Gbps next year (here); although they’re officially planning to support symmetric product speeds of up to 3.3Gbps (here); albeit possibly up to c.5Gbps too in the future.

Suffice to say that Virgin Media were hardly going to let that play out without a response, particularly as only a few years ago they could still boast about being “the UK’s fastest widely available broadband provider“. This would of course be a much more challenging claim to make today, particularly with so many ISPs now selling multi-gigabit packages via multiple networks.

What’s Coming Up?

According to our sources, Virgin Media are currently preparing to make changes to their bundles, which among other things looks as if it may remove their 125Mbps broadband tier and make 250Mbps the standard (when bundled with TV). On top of that, we’ve separately been seeing more indications of a possible 5Gbps package being in development.

For example, when setting up new connections in XGS-PON areas, the operator’s engineers typically use a special tablet to check the service. Some of the output from this now clearly shows “Broadband: 5000Mbps | Upload: 5000Mbps” for related lines (credits to YuGi for the evidence). But it should be noted that 5Gbps has been a profile data point in their internal API for a while now, although we’ve not seen it presented like this before.

However, we have already seen the provider’s Irish division introduce a 5Gbps tier during July 2025 (following a soft launch in Feb 2025), which is relevant because Virgin Media UK has recently had a tendency to follow Ireland’s lead. For example, VM Ireland launched 2Gbps in June 2023 and the UK followed about 8-9 months later. If the same trend repeats for 5Gbps, then a launch could come in a few months time.

A spokesperson for Virgin Media told ISPreview that they had “nothing to announce on this right now“, but readers should expect some changes soon, even if it’s currently unclear when 5Gbps itself might surface. We should point out that Virgin Media’s existing Hub 5x router already has a 10Gbps Ethernet port, so it wouldn’t necessarily require new CPE kit.

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The UK telecoms and media regulator, Ofcom, has warned consumers that fraudsters are attempting to impersonate them. In short, some people have received calls from scammers, which claim that services (e.g. broadband, phone etc.) have been fraudulently taken out in their name, when this is not the case.

The scammers will then ask for personal information (inc. financial details) and falsely claim they will transfer the victim to the police. So far, Ofcom says the scammers have successfully spoofed telephone numbers which make it appear as though the calls are legitimately coming from Ofcom. These include 020 7981 3040, 020 7981 3000 and 0300 123 3333.

However, while these calls might look legitimate, the regulator states “there are no circumstances in which Ofcom will call you out of the blue to ask for your personal or financial details“. Consumers who receive such a call should thus not share any personal/financial details and put the phone down. After that it’s recommended to report the call to Action Fraud.

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Good news. The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency will shortly announce that more areas of the United Kingdom are to be re-opened to the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS), which means that homes and businesses in poorly served areas will be able to apply for funding to help get faster internet connections installed.

The GBVS typically offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help both rural and some poorly served urban premises (homes and businesses) to get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed. This is available to areas with existing broadband speeds of “less than 100Mbps” – assuming there are also no near-term plans for a gigabit deployment in the same area (either via private investment or state-aid).

At present the availability of this scheme is limited to parts of Derbyshire, Birmingham and the Black Country, Merseyside and Greater Manchester, Greater London, Scotland and the Isle of Wight. The restriction is partly to avoid the voucher scheme clashing with Project Gigabit’s larger subsidised delivery contracts, although this is a constantly changing situation and so sometimes the current rules do need updating.

According to our sources, BDUK has identified through supplier engagement that premises in parts of Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Newcastle and North Tyneside, Norfolk, North East England and Wales are now suitable for opening to the GBVS. This will give designated broadband suppliers in each area the opportunity to identify and deliver new voucher projects.

In addition, more premises will also be opened to vouchers across existing areas, including Shropshire, Birmingham and the Black Country, Greater London, and Merseyside and Manchester. At present this change is not being reflected via the GBVS website, but ISPreview understands that this will happen very soon.

BDUK Supplier Notice

Suppliers are reminded that … any new voucher projects or changes to existing projects submitted across any of these new areas or any existing areas open to vouchers will be prioritised if they can be delivered, and all voucher funding can be claimed, before April 2027. Suppliers with approved GBVS projects that continue to deliver connections and draw down voucher funding to agreed milestones are not impacted by this prioritisation.

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Low-cost mobile operator iD Mobile (Currys), which harnesses Three UK’s (VodafoneThree) national 4G and 5G network via a virtual operator partnership (mvno), has discounted their 4G and 5G unlimited data (broadband) plan on a 24-month term to half price – £8 per month – for the first 6 months of service, rising to just £16 thereafter.

As usual, all of iD Mobile’s plans come with access to 5G, free Data Rollover (not relevant on their unlimited tier) and inclusive Roaming in 50 destinations worldwide as standard (note: there’s a 30GB data limit on roaming if your UK allowance is 30GB or more). Customers can optionally also take shorter 12-month and 30-day (no contract) plans, but these come at extra cost.

The operator also pledges that subscribers to longer terms will see “no annual price rises“.

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Some customers of the Sky Mobile (Sky Broadband, Sky TV etc.) service, which harnesses O2’s Mobile Virtual Network Operator platform, have recently been complaining about a spate of problems with getting eSIMs activated. But the good news is that Sky now appears to have removed the faulty eSIMs and has begun contacting users to sort replacements.

The issue cropped up on our discussion forum this week (here) after a number of Sky Mobile’s customers complained that the activation process for their eSIMs seemed to be failing. The same issue then reoccurred after Sky initially tried to replace those. Similar complaints could also be found strewn across Sky’s own Community Forum, where users appeared to be having some difficulty getting a full acknowledgement of the issue.

ISPreview raised the issue with Sky Mobile, which promptly confirmed that there had been an issue. The problem was apparently caused by a faulty batch of eSIMs, which have now been removed. Sky indicates that all new or replacement eSIMs should now work as expected, and they’re in the process of contacting affected customers directly by text. The operator also apologised to those who had been impacted by the problems this week.

Customers who have been having trouble with their eSIM have been advised to follow the replacement eSIM process:

Existing customers

• Sign in to your online account to order a replacement eSIM.
• Activate or install the replacement eSIM on the correct device.

New customers

• Call 0333 759 3347 and we’ll help you get set up.

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

Network operator Openreach took a few communications providers by surprise yesterday after they gave them just 48 hours to remove any lithium batteries from BT exchanges. The batteries are said to be prohibited by the operator’s building safety policy “due to the significant risks … [of] thermal runaway, fire and explosion“.

The move is interesting, as we’ve not previously been aware of any specific restriction being imposed against the use of a particular type of battery chemistry in Openreach’s rules, which usually adopt generalised language when discussing batteries. Some comms providers also told ISPreview that they were similarly uncertain about exactly where in Openreach’s docs this is expressed.

The official briefing, which isn’t available to the public, seems to refer specifically to the use of lithium batteries that exist within Colocation or Access Locate customer cabinets within BT’s exchanges. “Openreach mandates the use of lead acid batteries as the preferred and safest option for battery back up in CPs’ colocation or Access Locate customer cabinets,” said the briefing (a slight contradiction – using both “mandates” and then “preferred“).

The briefing also fails to make any distinction between regular LiPo (lithium polymer) and LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. The latter, which are now used in many industrial and home storage energy applications, have a safety record that is similar or even better than sealed lead acid batteries; because their unique chemical composition is less prone to overheating and thermal runaway.

Not to mention that lead-acid batteries contain hazardous substances like lead (obviously) and sulphuric acid, while LiFePO4 batteries are constructed with more non-toxic materials that can be recycled. Suffice to say that the blanket restriction against “lithium” seems unusual, and it may have been more forward-thinking to express stricter requirements.

In any case, Openreach clearly has serious safety concerns after identifying that “lithium batteries” are in use in some of BT’s exchanges, and they’ve now given such providers just 48 hours to remove them (on the surface this seems like an unreasonably short notice). “This instruction is made and is issued in accordance with the existing Revised Agreement for Access Network Facilities Services (“RANF Agreement”) and Access Locate contract. The relevant Product Description(s) will be updated accordingly to capture this instruction,” said Openreach. Providers must also notify the operator about their use of such batteries..

We’ve requested a bit more information from Openreach and will report back later.

UPDATE 1:57pm

Openreach informs ISPreview that they’ve only found an extremely small number of cases and thus don’t believe the move will have a significant impact.

A spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview:

“Safety is our number one priority, so we pay close attention to best practice, expert research and industry recommended standards when it comes to fire safety.

During a recent annual maintenance check in one of our exchanges, we discovered a handful of lithium batteries linked to some equipment owned by one Communications Provider.

This is extremely unusual. The use of batteries is rare in itself and, any CPs that do, overwhelmingly use the safer lead/acid variety.

We don’t believe this is a widespread issue which will impact any other CPs but, given the importance of safety in our buildings and wider estate, we felt it was the right thing to do to send out guidance on battery usage.”