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News The newly merged business will be one of the UK’s largest altnets with over 600,000 properties passed with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) Today, UK fibre altnets FullFibre and Zzoomm have announced they will merge their operations. The deal will make the nearly combined entity one of the UK’s largest alternative fibre networks, with over 600,000 properties ready for service and over 65,000 existing customers. According to the companies, the deal will create “significant opportunities to...

Alternative broadband network builders Zzoomm and FullFibre Limited (Fibre Heroes), both of which have been rolling out multi-gigabit speed capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) ISP networks across different parts of the United Kingdom, have this morning announced that they’ve agreed to merge to create one of the UK’s largest Altnets. At present Zzoomm’s network, which is home to over 30,000 customers (15%+ take-up) and covers 202,000 premises (RFS), is currently available across parts of...

Wireless infrastructure provider Freshwave has teamed-up with Electracom Projects to deliver a 4G mobile signal – from all four mobile network operators (MNOs) – to the 50-storey ‘8 Bishopsgate’ development in the City of London (CoL), which will benefit local businesses inside the property. The building represents the latest flagship CoL development of Mitsubishi Estate London and Stanhope PLC. The 50-storey tower offers more than 900,000 sq ft of space, some 500,000+ sq ft of which is for...

Mobile operators Three UK and O2 (Virgin Media) have today announced that they’re partnering with the cloud communications platform, Sinch, to make RCS Business Messaging (RBM) available on iOS (Apple iPhone, iPad etc.) for their customers – previously this was only available to Android based phones and devices. The announcement, which comes shortly after Three UK introduced support for regular Rich Communications Services (RCS or “Enhanced Chat“) alongside the iOS 18.2 update (here), means...

New data from Ookla, which runs the popular Speedtest.net broadband connection benchmarking service, has revealed that Storm Éowyn (pronounced ‘Ay-oh-win’) triggered a “rapid, severe and sustained decline” in mobile performance across all operators in Ireland and parts of the UK, particularly Northern Ireland and Scotland, on a “scale not seen before“. The particularly nasty storm system, which was the result of explosive cyclogenesis (aka – a weather bomb), hit on Friday morning and tore its...

City-focused ISP Hyperoptic, which since 2011 has built an alternative full fibre (FTTP/B) network to reach “more than” 1.73 million homes in parts of 64 UK towns and cities, has informed its staff that 2025 will see a “reduced volume of work” and thus a potential reduction in their infrastructure teams of nearly 130 jobs (out of nearly 280 potentially impacted roles). The operator, which at the last update in July 2024 said they were home to a customer base of 340,000 (with a target of...

Customers of debt-troubled UK internet provider TalkTalk have been given an uncomfortable reminder of the 2015 cyberattack (here), which came after the ISP admitted that it was “investigating” reports on a cybercrime forum that alleged the provider had suffered a new data breach. According to The Register, a member of the forum claimed that personal data belonging to 18.8 million current and former customers of TalkTalk had been leaked, including – subscriber PINs, first and last names, email...

The City of London Police (CoLP) have arrested a 29-year-old man after a climate protest group claimed to have “[disrupted] the wifi systems of hundreds of insurance companies across the UK“, which they achieved by cutting key fibre optic cables in London (similar events are also said to have occurred in Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield). In a post on Instagram, the relatively new group, calling itself Shut the System, said on Monday that its “activists” were “demanding an immediate end to...

News  BT has urged the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) providers to accelerate plans to transition away from the ageing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), warning that the outdated system poses growing risks to essential services  Increasingly fragile and difficult to maintain, the PSTN saw a 45% rise in major resilience incidents last year, according to Ofcom’s Connected Nations report.   BT warns that delays in migrating to digital connectivity could disrupt critical...

News To date, around 4.3 million connections have been made possible through federal gigabit funding    The German Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and Transport (BMDV) has launched its 2025 Gigabit Funding programme. Starting this month, €1.2 billion will be available to support infrastructure projects and a pilot programmes to close connectivity gaps in underserved areas.  This year’s funding round is centred on the 2025 infrastructure funding programme, which includes both a standard...