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There has been some consolidation activity in the fiber last mile this week. Gateway Fiber and WANRack have announced plans to merge into a national FTTX platform touching 25 states. … [visit site to read more]
The company has told its major investors that it will replace the DEI section of its managerial bonus scorecard with a “measure of employee engagement,” which will come into effect in April.
Currently, ten percent of the BT annual bonus for its 37,400 managers is made up of DEI targets, comprised of representation of women, disabled people and ethnic minorities, as well as employee engagement of underrepresented groups.
“We remain committed to our inclusion and representation targets and are making good progress towards them. Inclusion will remain part of our senior management bonus calculations and we have received strong support from our shareholders on the proposals to amend our group scorecard,” said a BT spokesperson.
Just last week, Kirkby told employees in a company memo “It’s been hard lately to see companies and governments stepping back from their commitment to inclusion, equity and diversity. For many of you watching this unfold, I imagine it feels worrying and upsetting.
“It sends the message that these things are optional, temporary or not worth prioritising. I want to be absolutely clear: that’s not what we believe at BT.”
The news comes as President Trump signed an Executive Order the day after his inauguration, terminating DEI initiatives in federal contracting. Similar initiatives have been rolled other large corporations, including Meta and Amazon in the tech sector and Walmart, McDonald’s, Ford Motors, and Target in other sectors.
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Also in the news:
Nokia and AT&T extend voice core partnership
UK PM urges for more European cooperation as suspicious subsea activity increases
From the bully pulpit: FCC’s Carr could pursuade allies over new subsea cable regulation
Keep up-to-date with all the latest news, articles, event and product updates posted on Developing Telecoms.
Subscribe to our FREE weekly email newsletters for the latest telecom info in developing and emerging markets globally.
A new data center, a new subsea cable, a new branch, and some FTTH: … [visit site to read more]
UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has urged European leaders for increased cooperation on subsea infrastructure defences at a European Council meeting in Brussels.
The call comes after an increase in suspicious activity from Chinese and Russian vessels around key European submarine cables. Last month, A Russian spy ship was caught in the English Channel attempting to gather information on critical underwater infrastructure.
Furthermore, there has been multiple submarine cable incidents in the Baltic Sea since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with many of these cable cuts – intentional or otherwise – being linked to Russian and Chinese vessels. As the frequency of these incidents has ramped up, NATO has deployed patrol ships to the region as part of a mission called ‘Baltic Sentry’.
“We need to deepen co-operation to protect ourselves from state threats and sabotage, including on sub-sea infrastructure,” said Sir Kier in an address to European leaders.
In disclosed correspondence between House of Lords Peers Lord Coaker and Lord West of Spithead, it has been revealed that the UK’s first multi-role ocean surveillance ship, RFA Proteus, has been deployed as part of a broader plan to protect national infrastructure, with a second vessel still in the early planning stages.
The government is “committed to ensuring the security and resilience of the UK’s telecommunications infrastructure” and pointed to ongoing coordination with government agencies and the subsea cable industry, said Lord Coaker.
Just last week, The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) announced that it would explore the security credentials of the UK’s submarine cable ecosystem as part of a new industry enquiry, in a direct response to the increase in suspected malicious underwater activity.
The government emphasised the UK’s reliance on its 60 existing submarine cables, warning of the potential disruption that damage to multiple cables at once would cause the UK.
Also in the news:
From the bully pulpit: FCC’s Carr could pursuade allies over new subsea cable regulation
Labour to slash rural broadband funding
EE renews partnership with Home Nations Football Associations and Wembley Stadium
Taking a leap forward from 4.7, 4.8 focuses on one of the more major changes in the industry today, the addition of IPv6, both to help combat the scarcity of remaining IPv4 addresses and their rising financial upkeep costs.
Additionally, Further QoL changes have been made to SERVERware to streamline DNS record management as well as the overall experience with using the SERVERware GUI.
Let’s find out about it in a bit more detail, shall we?
While IPv4 addresses still retain relevance, their growing scarcity has started to impose issues for address translation for SIP traffic as well as monetary issues in regards to their procurement.
That’s why we have enabled support for IPv6 addressing in both SERVERware and sipPROT.
This support relays across most of SERVERware’s core systems like: networking, addressing, geo-redundancy and DNS resolution.
Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are still supported thanks to SERVERware’s dual stack network configuration support with the note that the IPv6 feature is still in the testing phase and may receive changes down the line.
Networking has added a new tab for adding IPv6 subnets where both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses will be available when reserving address space for Partition resources and configuring VPS network interfaces.
As far as Addressing is concerned, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can be assigned.
However, currently only static IPv6 addresses can be assigned, but look forward to dynamic IPv6 addressing in the future.
With Geo-Redundancy, both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address can be used as a failover option under Geo-Redundancy settings.
And for DNS Resolution, SERVERware’s CoreDNS service responsible for handling DNS queries now supports resolving AAAA records for IPv6 addresses.
In an effort to support localization of our products and make them easier to use for users who aren’t native English speakers, a French translation for SERVERware will be available with v4.8.
Almost every aspect will be fully translated, including backend messages.
The only parts of SERVERware that will remain in English are system logs in order to ensure quick response times from our Support and Dev teams for troubleshooting purposes.
We aim to localize SERVERware across more languages in the future. Should you have any particular requests on which languages you’d want us to add next, feel free to reach out to us.
The inclusion of the SERVERware template restructure was well received, however we always aim to provide you with the best experience which is why we’ve continued to improve upon it as v4.8 introduces template verification and online signatures for templates stored on the Bicom repository.
This serves to add an extra layer of protection to your systems as unsigned templates will now trigger a warning to notify you that you’re about to install an unsigned template at your discretion, allowing you to either proceed with the install or cancel it if you were prompted to install a fake or unsafe version by mistake.
The next major update coming with 4.8 is CNAME record resolution and assignment support for VPSs that are running on SERVERware which should help simplify DNS A record management for domains.
This change has made it possible to create multiple CNAME records for a single VPS with different DNS names that’ll still be resolved to the same IP address by the SERVERware Controller.
In order to facilitate this change, we’ve redesigned the existing DNS SRV tab to provide a more intuitive layout that should simplify the addition of DNS records to a designated VPS, with the option to edit existing records.
In order to provide further redundancy options for any unforeseen downtime, 4.8 is adding secondary DNS zone persistence for SERVERware sites that depend on the Controller’s ability to respond to DNS queries.
It ensures that the DNS zone information remains reachable even if the primary DNS zone goes down for any reason as all the information on it is stored on the site that’s designated and configured to act as the secondary DNS zone.
It should respond to DNS queries in place of the primary zone should the latter go down.
To provide a way for seasoned developers to recall all of SERVERware’s functionalities in regards to VPS management as well as make it easier to onboard new ones, we’ve introduced API documentation to SERVERware.
It can be found under the “Account Settings” tab and it provides detailed information about managing VPSs with example outputs and the possibility to test each API call directly from the UI.
As mentioned earlier, sipPROT has also seen an update with SERVERware’s IPv6 address support, allowing sipPROT to further enhance its security capabilities by adding IPv6 address ranges into its attack detection radius.
This also applies to its dynamic blocking, allowing it to automatically detect and block potential malicious actors trying to stage an attack on your systems from an IPv6 address.
Similar to SERVERware, sipPROT is also getting its own API documentation section, detailing all actions revolving around IP address list management as well as including calls for fetching data from Attack Logs and Hosts tabs, making it useful for devs both new and seasoned.
The standalone version of sipPROT will receive its own API documentation section in the next sipPROT release.
Alongside these major changes, we’ve also been hard at work ironing out any kinks and squashing bugs that were present prior, ensuring a smoother experience with both SERVERware and sipPROT alike.
For more detailed information regarding all the changes, you can check out the full v4.8 release notes here.
We are sure to continue our efforts in developing a platform that satisfies the needs of your clients while retaining its intuitive design throughout and we are looking forward to showing you more of what we have in store, but more on that in our future releases.
Until then, we hope to have met your expectations and that both you and your clients remain satisfied.
7.4 ushers in the new year with a heap of changes to our products that may appear simple, but are integral in delivering both a modern work environment and the safety that one would expect to have while utilizing it.
Starting off with PBXware, one of the major changes in this version is the introduction of the OAuth2 App capability, allowing customers to add their own OAuth apps that can be used to both create and manage multiple credentials per app.
The currently available options relate to SMTP and Fax2Email functionalities.
In 7.4 gloCOM is receiving an MSIX installer option for Windows operating systems, allowing users to have a more streamlined way of both installing and uninstalling the app that comes bundled with boosted install success rates, lower network bandwidth and no file duplication across apps.
Additionally, macOS users are getting a similar quality of life update with the creation of a universal binary that will work for both Apple silicon and Intel-based Mac computers, reducing the hassle of needing separate installers for the two systems.
On the more practical side of things, gloCOM is receiving an update to its call forwarding functionality, allowing you to forward calls toward a specified number, or to a voice box instead of letting the call drop.
This should help in improving customer frustration and is particularly useful to set up if you’re receiving a call outside of operating hours.
Additionally, gloCOM GO is now capable of utilizing the pause (,) and wait-to-dial (;) symbols, the addition of which was made with the intent of improving call handling times and to streamline dialing numbers that required automated prompts like PINs or other extensions.
Users have access to these inputs by long-pressing the “*” and “#” buttons on the dialpad respectively.
gloCOM’s messaging feature has also received two significant upgrades with 7.4.
The first improvement was made to an already existing feature, Chat Reactions. With 7.4 their use won’t be restricted to group chats alone and will now be usable in 1-on-1 conversations as well.
The other improvement is directed at our Android gloCOM GO users, the ability to expand the text chat input to full screen to make message previews clearer and to enable more coherent correspondence over mobile devices.
Contact Center’s focus in v7.4 was on providing agents with more tools to monitor and improve the customer and agent experience as well as automate a few tedious processes.
Email signature templates are a novelty with 7.4, a quality of life feature that allows for the creation of personalized signatures based on company templates that can be used in order to maintain consistent branding across all forms of communication and to maintain the company’s professional image.
Starting with 7.4, Omnichannel license holders will now have access to LiveChat forms, the “Pre-Chat” form from an earlier release and the all new “Leave a Message” form.
The Pre-Chat form is now configurable which means that the company admin can decide if the information on the customers will be collected prior to getting routed to an agent in order to provide them with a better and more useful experience.
Meanwhile, the Leave a Message form is used when a customer sends a message on LiveChat outside of operating hours and is set up by specifying an email address that customers can redirect their problems and questions to should they wish to do so.
The key goal of this form is to let agents pick up the conversation with the customer at a later time, even if the customer has left the visited webpage/live chat and answer their questions.
The next major addition for Contact Center is the Customer Satisfaction survey for both voice and messaging queues. As the name implies, this feature is utilized to gather feedback from customers after a completed voice or messaging conversation in order to gauge agent performance, identify potential pain points and improve it going forward.
Another customer-oriented novelty is the Returning Customer feature, one that utilizes information gathered on the customer from previous interactions in order to reconnect them to the agent they’ve talked to prior, helping reduce customer frustration and improve handling time.
Finally, a quality of life update for Contact Center users, the ability to link call records directly to the CRM of choice, helping reduce storage space constraints with specific CRM packages and removing the need for downloading call records in general.
These are only some of the more notable changes that have been introduced with the release of 7.4.
Plenty of other bug fixes, quality of life changes and feature updates have also been introduced, like:
These changes should further streamline your experience with the Bicom product suite as a whole as well as make your work easier going forward.
We look forward to seeing your feedback on these new additions and hope that the changes in v7.4 have increased your overall enjoyment of our products.
The fallout from the recent announcement, reported on these pages, that José Maria Álvares-Pallete had resigned from his position as Chairman & CEO of Telefónica has continued with news that he will not stay in the position of Chair of the GSMA Board of Directors.
“By virtue of this resignation, he is no longer able to continue in the position of the Chair of the GSMA,” the GSMA said. Álvarez-Pallete had been the CEO of Telefonica since April 2016.
The industry organisation, which represents the interests of mobile network operators worldwide, added: “The GSMA is grateful for his contribution to the organisation and to the industry overall.”
It continued: “Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel Group and GSMA’s Deputy Chair, will be Acting Chair of the GSMA Board until the Board elects a new chair after MWC Barcelona. Also, we are pleased to share that Mr Marc Murtra, new Chairman & CEO of Telefónica, will represent Telefonica on the GSMA Board with immediate effect.”
Vittal, whose company is the second-biggest operator in India and is a major player in South Asia and Africa, was recently re-elected as the Deputy Chairman of the GSMA board. He has also served the board as a key member for the term 2019-2020.
The GSMA is an industry association that today unites over 1,000 mobile operators and businesses across the ecosystem and related industries. There are 26 members of the GSMA Board, including senior representatives from global operators, as well as smaller independent operators.
As we reported at the time, a Telefónica statement explained that Álvarez-Pallete’s contract was terminated following a board meeting on 18 January to align with the company’s “new shareholding structure” and meet the wishes of certain new shareholders for a “new stage” of leadership.
An upgrade, a new PoP, some datacenter investment, and a subsea cable project gets funded: … [visit site to read more]
