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Press Release

Sceye, a U.S. aerospace and material science company specializing in High-Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) for telecommunications and real-time environmental monitoring, today announced the successful trans-Pacific flight of its Service Test 1 (ST1) mission from New Mexico to Japan. Traveling more than 15,000 km through the stratosphere in 13 days, upon arrival over Japan, ST1 demonstrated mobile broadband connectivity to unmodified devices through SoftBank Corp.’s core network and HAPS-based edge computing and communication with drones to support the development of a 3D communications network.

Conducted in partnership with SoftBank Corp., a leading operator of telecommunications and IT businesses in Japan and globally, ST1 marks Sceye’s first flight to Asia and a groundbreaking milestone towards the commercial deployment of HAPS as stratospheric infrastructure.

“This flight marks a defining moment for Sceye and for the commercial potential of HAPS,” said Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Founder and CEO of Sceye. “Flying from the US to Japan demonstrates the performance required to make the stratosphere a viable layer of infrastructure and realize the future of AI, edge computing, and 6G. Together with SoftBank, we are moving beyond proving the technology to demonstrating how Sceye can complement and extend existing networks and deliver persistent connectivity at scale.”

The stratosphere offers the optimal vantage point: It is close enough to Earth for high-capacity connectivity and observation, yet the altitude is high enough for wide-area reach. Importantly, the stratosphere offers space-like conditions without the cost of being in space and the disadvantages of being in orbit. Sceye’s HAPS maintain altitude and their area of operation in the stratosphere through consecutive day and night cycles, operating like geostationary satellites, only 1,800 times closer to Earth and at a fraction of the cost.

In 2025, SoftBank Corp. invested in Sceye’s HAPS-based stratospheric infrastructure as a scalable solution to complement terrestrial towers and satellite constellations. The strategic partnership advances a shared vision for HAPS and Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) as transformative infrastructure that can expand connectivity, support communications during disasters, and enable future applications across AI, IoT, aerial communications, edge computing, and 6G.

ST1 carried SceyeCELL, a first-of-its-kind “cell tower in the sky” designed to deliver wide-area mobile broadband directly to standard devices from the stratosphere. When deployed at full scale, one Sceye HAPS is designed to cover the equivalent area of approximately 500 terrestrial towers. During the ST1 mission, Sceye and SoftBank demonstrated mobile broadband from the stratosphere, including text messaging, voice calls, internet access, and video streaming. Testing also included emergency calls, using an emergency alert messaging system designed for large-scale disasters, and communications with drones.

Sceye’s ST1 mission launched on August 9, 2026 at 7:00 AM MDT from New Mexico. Additional notable mission attributes include:

• Traveled more than 15,000 km across the Pacific to Japan in 13 days

• Operated within Japanese managed air space for over 7 days

• Remained continuously within its area of operation for an extended period, achieving a station-seeking radius as low as 5 km

• Operated at approximately 16.5 km in altitude while completing telecommunications, drone, and emergency communications

• Confirmed communications performance equivalent to that of terrestrial networks while reducing radio interference with ground-based base stations

• Through a server installed on the HAPS, Sceye and SoftBank conducted data processing directly on the platform, demonstrating average round-trip processing response time of 68 milliseconds, reducing communications latency by over 40% compared with internet-based cloud processing. This marks the world’s first successful test in which a mobile core network and a web server for processing were installed on a HAPS, enabling response processing to be performed entirely onboard the HAPS and the results to be relayed back to smartphones.

ST1 remains in flight, returning towards the United States over the Pacific Ocean at the time of this announcement.

“SoftBank aims to build next-generation communications infrastructure that seamlessly connects the ground, the sky, and space. The fact that Sceye’s HAPS reached Japan from the United States and successfully provided Japan’s first trial services from the stratosphere in Japan’s airspace marks an important step toward the commercialization of HAPS, which is at the core of this vision,” said Junichi Miyakawa, President & CEO of SoftBank Corp. “By combining the HAPS flight and operational technologies that Sceye has developed with SoftBank’s communications technologies, we have gained confidence to realize a three-dimensional communications network utilizing HAPS. Going forward, in collaboration with Sceye, we will continue to integrate a wide range of technologies, including communications and AI, to develop HAPS into a new form of social infrastructure.”

This flight builds on Sceye’s Endurance Program, completed earlier this year, when its SE2 HAPS traveled more than 10,000 km in the stratosphere from New Mexico to the coast of Brazil where it stayed over its area of operation for several days to test long-duration performance in preparation for the Service Test Program, the first of which flew to Japan.

Also in the news
Shared Rural Network rollout extends to UK national parks with over 150 4G masts live
Vodafone touts latest attempt to bridge the UK’s digital divide
Virgin Media O2 cuts 5,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions

Contributed Article

by Ayswarya Ashok, Founder and CEO of Halleyx

The UK fibre story has been told in terms of homes reached.

Full fibre now reaches 24.9 million premises (82% of UK homes), with 47% taking a full-fibre service. By 2028, Ofcom expects 73% of UK homes to have access to at least two gigabit-capable networks.

The industry has spent years answering:

“Can we connect the home?”

But in an MDU, that question is only the beginning.

An apartment building may be one premise on a coverage map, but it can represent hundreds of customers, propositions and decisions.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important.

A building is not a customer

Consider a 300-unit apartment building.

The building has one location, but 300 realities.

One unit has a customer. Another is vacant. Another has a network. Another may be covered by a building agreement. One customer wants an upgrade while another moves out.

The network infrastructure may remain the same.

The commercial context doesn’t.

Customer. Product. Price. Eligibility. Service. Billing.

All can change from one unit to the next.

Take Flat 217, for example. The resident wants to move from 500Mbps to 1Gbps.

The question isn’t whether fibre reaches Flat 217.

The operator needs to establish whether the service is eligible under the building agreement, whether 1Gbps is included or an additional purchase, what price applies, which network should fulfil it, whether the change requires a new order or modification, and what billing should charge.

And this is where I think the MDU conversation needs to change.

The problem isn’t that operators don’t have the data. It’s that the commercial context isn’t travelling with the unit.

The unit is the missing context

Most telecom journeys follow:

Customer → Product → Order → Service → Bill

MDUs add something that doesn’t fit into that model:

Building → Unit → Customer

The customer is temporary.

The unit is persistent.

When one resident leaves Flat 217, the next resident shouldn’t inherit a blank record. The operator should already know the unit’s network availability, applicable building agreement, eligible propositions and commercial rules.

The same applies when something changes at building level.

A new agreement, network, product or pricing rule shouldn’t require teams to manually work through hundreds of units to understand the impact.

The building should establish the context. The unit should carry that context into every transaction.

That’s the missing link.

What should “MDU Ready” actually mean?

For me, MDU readiness shouldn’t stop at serviceable.

It should mean that an operator can take a unit and answer, without manual reconciliation:

Can I sell this product to this unit? At what price? Under which commercial terms? Through which network? What order should be created? What should ultimately be billed?

And the answer should remain consistent from:

Qualification → Proposition → Order → Activation → Billing

Operators should look beyond coverage and take-up and start measuring how many MDU transactions require human intervention.

How many need commercial overrides? How many orders are corrected? How long does qualification take to reach activation? How many billing issues can be traced back to an earlier commercial decision?

These questions tell us how efficiently a network converts availability into revenue.

The next MDU advantage

Fibre availability is becoming less of a differentiator. What happens after availability will matter more.

When every unit can have a different customer, product, price, network and commercial agreement, the ability to manage that complexity without manual intervention becomes a competitive advantage.

The building is connected.

Now make every unit count.

Are you maximising the value of your networks? Join HalleyX and the UK fibre industry at Connected Britain 2026, the UK’s largest digital economy event 

Contributed Article

By Sylwia Kechiche, VP Industry Analysis at Opensignal

In a market where full fibre broadband now passes 82% of UK premises and mobile connections outnumber people, acquiring genuinely new customers is hard. Most acquisition growth today comes from switching, not from bringing net new subscribers into the market. Every customer an operator wins is one another operator has lost. In such an environment, retention is no longer a secondary concern.

Homes passed don’t translate into homes connected

One of the less-discussed challenges in the UK is that a large share of consumers already believe they have fibre, even when they don’t. FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet), FTTP (fibre-to-the-premise), FTTH (fibre-to-the-home), full fiber, superfast: the terminology has been used interchangeably in marketing for years, and customers have absorbed the confusion. When genuine full fibre arrives in a street, it often doesn’t land with the impact operators expect. Take-up of full fibre where it’s available sits at just 42%, according to Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2025 report.

Part of the experience gap is in-home. A customer on a full fibre connection with inadequate Wi-Fi equipment will still have a poor experience, and operators who can’t distinguish network performance from in-home equipment issues can’t fix the right problem. Operators are therefore left with a multi-layered conundrum: how to educate consumers about what they actually have access to, while also ensuring those same consumers take the right actions to receive the full promise of the network.

What ‘good connectivity’ means

At Opensignal, we measure network experience from the consumer’s perspective, capturing “lived,” what actually happens when you stream, video call, or work from home.

Even though I’ve spent 20 years analyzing telecoms data, when I’m on a Zoom call or trying to video call my mum, I am not thinking about what technology powers my connection. I care whether it allows me to do what I need to do, when I need it. Most people are the same. We compare notes and complain about the moments when connectivity lets us down: the dropped call, the frozen screen, the meeting where audio kept cutting out. That’s what customers remember, and that’s what they act on when it’s time to renew.

Opensignal’s Subscriber Analytics product tracks switching patterns at the sub-regional level, giving operators a view of where churn risk is building before it shows up in their quarterly numbers. It also shows where the opportunity is: markets where penetration of converged customers sits well below what the network footprint would suggest. Paired with visibility of competitor performance, operators can see not just where they’re losing customers, but to whom and on which metrics.

The data shows that retention risk is concentrated where altnet FTTP experience is genuinely strong and customers have a credible alternative. This is not a low-end market problem. We are seeing the premium end of the market switching to altnets and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) too. Ofcom estimates 23% of UK households, around 5.3 million, struggle to afford their communications services. But even customers who can afford to pay a premium are shopping for the best combination of price and experience, and they move when they find it.

Bundling is an experience lever, not just a billing strategy

The case for bundling is clearer than operators tend to act on it. Consider Vodafone: nearly half its broadband customers already use Vodafone for mobile, yet the other half don’t, despite being reachable within the same commercial relationship. Opensignal’s Subscriber Analytics shows that customers who do bundle churn at a fraction of the rate of those who don’t, and the effect holds consistently across the major UK players. Bundled customers are harder to lose, and they give operators more to work with: more experience data, more touchpoints, more insights into what’s working and what isn’t.

So, what’s the path to closing that gap? It starts with treating the broadband–mobile relationship as an experience question before a pricing one. Operators who target cross-sell based on where the experience is strong, rather than on the basis of promotional timing, convert better and retain longer.

Sylwia Kechiche is VP Industry Analysis at Opensignal and will be speaking on the Customer Strategy panel at Connected Britain 2026, 10 September, 12:40, Keynote Theatre.

Join Opensignal on Day 2 of Connected Britain 2026 at @ 12:40

Customer strategy: Shifting the focus from acquisition to retention

Speakers include:

• Tim Stranack, Regulatory & Trade Director, Community fibre
• Neil Smith, Chief Operating Officer, TalkTalk
• Moderator: Hayden Shaw, Insight Director, FDM CCS Insight
• Vasa Babic, Head of EMEA, Actifai
• Krystian Heald, Head of Partnerships, ISPA UK

ICT giant ZTE, and BBTEC, a telecommunications and engineering service provider in Thailand, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to establish a strategic framework to explore business opportunities in AI digital infrastructure, data centre infrastructure and energy solutions in Thailand.

The partners say the MoU framework marks an important step for both companies to assess how ZTE’s global technology expertise can be aligned with BBTEC’s local engineering resources, network infrastructure capabilities and market presence.

Under the terms of the MoU, ZTE and BBTEC intend to explore potential collaboration in such areas as high-performance AI server hardware integrated with liquid cooling thermal designs. They will also assess green energy solutions and energy management solutions and look at data centre network infrastructure, optical transport, IP networking systems, and related software solutions.

In addition the MoU includes exploration of joint market engagement and technical feasibility assessments for potential projects in both the public and private sectors.

As AI adoption and data-intensive applications grow in Thailand, both companies say they recognise the rising demand for efficient computing, data centre capacity, and resilient energy systems. Through this strategic framework, ZTE and BBTEC aim to identify potential joint solutions that can address these market requirements.

Zhang Yanmeng, CEO of ZTE Thailand, explains: « Thailand is entering a vital phase of digital infrastructure growth. Through this MoU with BBTEC, we look forward to exploring how our global technology portfolio can combine with BBTEC’s strong local engineering capabilities to contribute to a more connected and sustainable infrastructure landscape. »

Four interesting items, two from across the pond and two from out west: … [visit site to read more]