News

News  Cellnex acquired a 72% stake in the company in 2017 for €430 million  Spanish TowerCo Cellnex is considering the sale of its Swiss subsidiary, according to a report from Spanish newspaper Expansion, which cited unnamed sources.  The report says US investment bank JP Morgan has been selected as an advisor for the potential sale of its stake. According to the unnamed sources, the company’s Swiss tower business could be worth up to €1.5 billion, with Cellnex’s 72% stake worth approximately...

Security and VPN researchers Simon Migliano and Mathy Vanhoef have published a new report today that warns “over 4 million internet hosts“, including VPN servers and private home broadband routers, were found to be vulnerable to being hijacked to perform anonymous attacks and provide access to their private networks – thanks to “new vulnerabilities in multiple tunneling protocols“. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-7595, CVE-2025-23018/23019 and CVE-2024-7596), which relates to how internet hosts...

News The new partnership with Oceanic Environmental Cables (OEC) save more than 35,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e) from reusing the cable materials The new deal will see OEC acquire and recover over 22,000km of Sparkle’s unused submarine cables from the Mediterranean seabed. From there, the cables will be delivered to OEC’s partners where they will be dismantled and analysed, with recovered materials repurposed or remanufactured. Recovered materials include optical fibre, copper,...

Eastbourne-based alternative network operator and UK ISP Lightning Fibre, which is building a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of Sussex and Kent in England, has today announced a package refresh for the New Year that delivers some speed boosts and pricing changes. In terms of what’s changing. The entry level package has been doubled from 150Mbps (symmetric) to 300Mbps for £28 per month to pitch the company head-to-head with its mainstream competitors (i.e. Sky...

The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has today proposed to make it quicker for people to access Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) providers, which are third-party ombudsman schemes that help consumers to resolve complaints with their phone providers, broadband ISPs and mobile operators. The regulator currently requires that all telecoms service providers – those offering services to consumers and small businesses – must be members of an approved ADR scheme (there are two of these – CISAS...

Broadband, phone and pay TV provider Virgin Media (O2) has notified its customers that their Community Forum platform will tomorrow – starting at around 10am – go through a “major upgrade“, which will see the ISP switch from using the older Khoros ‘Classic’ platform over to the modern ‘Aurora’ one. The community, which will be offline for the duration of the upgrade process (it’s expected to return by the afternoon or late evening), should then return with a “different look and feel“. For...

News  The joint venture will build up to 2,000 new base stations that will then be shared with other mobile operators in the country  Vodacom and Orange have formed a new infrastructure joint venture aimed at improving mobile network coverage in rural areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The business will focus on building solar-powered mobile base stations in underserved regions, helping to extend mobile and financial services to up to 19 million people.  Over the next six years,...

News Two and a half years after acquiring the spectrum at auction, the Indian conglomerate has yet to make use of its airwaves Reports this week suggest that Adani Group is considering surrendering it 5G mmWave spectrum after failing to turn its dream of deploying private 5G networks into reality. According to the reports, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has sent multiple requests to the company asking how it intends to use the currently idle spectrum, as well as penalising it for...

Spiders have an awkward habit of getting pretty much everywhere imaginable, which is probably down to their deep connection to the web. But spare a thought for one of Openreach’s UK broadband engineers in the Staffordshire village of Hixon who, while working on top of a telecoms pole, had to do a bit of extra debugging after opening up a cable box to find this surprise. Over the years we’ve seen plenty of animal and insect related damage occurring on UK broadband networks, from swarms of Bees...

The descriptively named Data Communications Company (DCC), which manages Britain’s national Smart Meter network(s), recently began their first live customer trials that will see existing Smart Meters in UK homes being upgraded to use Toshiba’s new 4G Communication Hub. Several suppliers, such as E.on and British Gas, are taking part. The development was actually announced just before Christmas, so we’re playing catch-up today. At present, existing Smart Meters (SMETS 1 and SMETS 2) use a mix...