News

The Connecting Cambridgeshire project, which is led by the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority, has today issued a progress update on their “Dig Once” policy and efforts to accelerate the roll-out of gigabit broadband across the county, with 21.6km of new fibre ducting already installed or soon to be deployed. Both Cityfibre and Gigaclear have now harnessed this. Just to recap. The programme’s “Dig Once” policy was one of the first to include fibre ducting in new transport...

Broadband ISP connections on CityFibre’s UK full fibre (FTTP) network in Glasgow have been knocked offline after a potential fire caused damage to the operator’s local Fibre Exchange (FEX) last night, which took down their core link (gla1215). But unusually they’re having to pull in a specialist electrician from Portsmouth as they don’t have any in Scotland. The outage, which affected 1,936 of the provider’s local FTTP customers, appears to have started around 11:30pm following an “alert...

Broadband and mobile operator Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) has today announced that around 1,500 employees (i.e. customer service, commercial and legal teams) are set to move to their new North West HQ in late 2025, which is to be based out of the Island (pictured) building – a net zero carbon workspace in central Manchester. The new multi-million-pound contract, which is occurring because the lease on the operator’s Wythenshawe office (they’ve occupied this since 1991) is due to expire in early...

The government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has revealed that they’ve made some tweaks to the state aid funded Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Teesdale (Lot 4.01) and North Northumberland (Lot 34.01), which were both awarded to alternative network ISP GoFibre (BorderLink) during 2022 (here and here). Just to recap. The Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme has spent the past few years aiming to help extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to cover at least...

News  The huge growth of AI, particularly generative AI, has skyrocketed tech company’s energy usage Google has signed the world’s first nuclear energy agreement with Kairos Power to supply nuclear power to meet its electricity demand for AI.  The financial details of the deal were not disclosed, not where the plants are to be built. The first reactor is expected to go online by 2030, with more to follow by 2035. The deal aims to support the growing electricity demands of AI technologies,...

News  The company recently received a cash injection of £400 million in a rescue deal  TalkTalk’s auditor Deloitte has quit after over 22 years in the position, according to a recent report from the Telegraph.  Deloitte cited serious concerns over the telecom company’s financial controls. The resignation letter from Deloitte pointed to “weaknesses and deficiencies” in TalkTalk’s internal controls over financial reporting, which had not been addressed despite previous warnings. It is “not at...

Edinburgh-based UK alternative network ISP GoFibre (BorderLink) has today announced that they’ve “completed” their planned roll-out of a new full fibre (FTTP) broadband network to the Borders area, which has covered 25,000 rural premises. This is a big chunk of the 118,000 they already cover across the North of England and Scotland (up from 115k on 28th Aug 2024). The announcement notes that more than 500 business customers, such as Borders Buses, are also now connected to the network. But...

Hampshire-based network builder and ISP toob, which is rolling out a gigabit speed full fibre (FTTP) network across parts of South England, has expanded their availability to include the Bedfordshire town of Luton, as well as the cities of Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) and Leicester (Leicestershire). But this will be via their partnership with Cityfibre (not own build). Just to recap. Toob is currently being financed through equity from funds managed and advised by the Amber Infrastructure Group,...

Network operator Openreach (BT) has named Exeter engineer Mari Owen (40), who installs full fibre (FTTP) broadband around Devon and Cornwall in South West England, as their ‘Engineer of the Year 2024‘ for her “outside the box” approach to problem-solving and ability to tackle “some of the most complex and diverse jobs“. Mari Owen, who only started as a trainee with the UK’s biggest broadband network provider in 2020, won Openreach’s highest engineering award at the company’s annual Shining...

News  The news comes just weeks after the company inked deal with Indian telco Vodafone Idea  Sweden’s Ericsson has won a new multi-billion dollar 5G equipment contract with Bharti Airtel according to an exclusive Reuters article published this week, citing people familiar with the matter.  Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, but according to Reuters, the newly secured contracts are expected to boost Ericsson’s revenue for 2025, after a fall in contracts from India in the...