News

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and UScellular have sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announcing voluntary commitments to meet aviation safety concerns

At the start of 2021, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon spent nearly $80 billion on C-band spectrum at the FCC’s 5G auction. This spectrum was pegged to be the focal point of the trio’s respective 5G networks, offering the ideal balance of high speed, low latency, and broad coverage.

By the start of 2022, however, a storm was brewing within the US aviation industry, with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) fearing that the new 5G spectrum could interfere with sensitive flight instrumentation, such as altimeters.

While most of the telecoms industry ­– and, indeed, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency – believes these fears to be largely unfounded, it did not stop the US mobile operators from initially delaying their initial 5G rollouts and limiting their deployments near airports.

The FAA, meanwhile, said that it would begin requiring updated altimeters that are unaffected by the C-band spectrum to be fitted in its commercial aircraft.

Since then, discussions between the aviation and telecoms industries have been ongoing. In February 2023, the FAA said that it was now formally engaged in discussions with the nation’s leading wireless providers, saying they hoped to reach an amiable solution by July.

Now, it appears that just such a conclusion has been reached, with the mobile operators sending a joint letter to the FCC, having agreed voluntary concessions with the FAA to allay aviation safety worries.

“These voluntary commitments will support full-power deployments across C-Band, and are crafted to minimize the operational impact on our C-Band operations,” said the letter, signed by Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and UScellular.

Exactly what these commitments are is unclear, but sources suggest that they may last until 2028, with the FAA having initially sought concessions up to 2033.

In a statement, Verizon explained that the decision would ensure they were able to “fully use our C-band spectrum for 5G by the previously agreed to deadline of July 1.”

Want to keep up to date with all the latest news from the international telecoms sector? Click here to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter direct to your inbox

Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
Vodafone to cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany
Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

Stellium Data Centres and CBRE have released The North of England Data Centres Market Report. The free report, which was commissioned by Stellium Data Centres, can be downloaded here.

Focusing on the economic growth and data centre capacity available in the North of England, the report notes the UK’s Northeast as having the lowest carbon intensity of any UK transmission area – a crucial requirement it says for a cloud service provider or hyperscaler – and which will benefit further with the development of large-scale renewable power from Dogger Bank, the largest off-shore wind farm in Europe.

CBRE cites Stellium 1, the Newcastle-based data centre operator’s scalable 80MW, 4,264 square metres colocation facility, as the largest in the region and one of the few capable of offering hyperscalers and large enterprises a viable alternative wholesale solution to London/Southern England. CBRE also highlighted Stellium’s campus as suitable for meeting wholesale requirements.

Keith Breed, Senior Research Analyst, Data Centres of CBRE said: “Selected Northern data centres such as Stellium 1 are becoming a strong proposition as a connectivity hub by providing access to fibre, dark fibre, Internet Exchanges (IXPs) and subsea cables – offering low latency local, national and international communications.”

He added: “The lower cost base compared with London and substantial reserves of available renewable power, positions the North as a potential alternative to the power constrained and relatively high-cost London region, where wholesale capacity has traditionally been based.” Stellium 1 is the only UK data centre with a secure landing station for housing the world’s latest subsea cable networks. These include AquaComms (to/from the US on the North Atlantic Loop) and Altibox (to/from the Nordics/Mainland Europe on NO-UK). Stellium also hosts the NCL-IX Exchange offering multiple peering opportunities to customers to minimise latency and transit costs.

Additionally, Stellium owns a 40 km carrier-neutral metropolitan area optical fibre network (MAN), complementing the Newcastle City high speed network and supporting the Northeast’s digital economy by enabling local full fibre network (LFFN) and 5G services.

Paul Mellon, Operations Director, Stellium Data Centres, commented: “CBRE’s research findings are well-aligned to our vision and strategy of making Stellium 1 the go-to wholesale data centre in the North of England for large enterprise, cloud and hyperscaler organisations. We are the only data centre operator offering a totally secure low latency UK alternative to London for internet traffic from the USA, Europe and Nordics.”

Stellium Data Centres will be joining Submarine Networks EMEA 2023 as a Gold Sponsor and will take part in a discussion on “Building the communications eco-system: from subsea, to the data centre, and beyond” on 31st May. To join Stellium and 800 senior leaders from the global subsea cable industry, head to the event website to book your ticket.

News

According to reports, the deal could be worth over $4 billion

Vodafone has long lamented the highly competitive nature of the Spanish telecoms market, in which they compete fiercely with Movistar, Orange, and MasMovil in an ongoing price war.

For some time, the company had hoped that market consolidation would be the solution to their woes, with rumours of a potential merger with MasMovil rising and falling repeatedly in recent years.

Indeed, this focus on consolidation in competitive markets quickly became something of a bugbear for the multinational mobile operator. Championed by then CEO Nick Read, Vodafone explored numerous tie-ups in markets including Italy, Belgium, and the UK.

But while discussions with Three UK appear to now be bearing fruit, a dearth of other merger deals meant that this news came too late for Read, who resigned at the end of last year.

In Spain specifically, Vodafone’s dreams of consolidation were ultimately quashed when MasMovil instead signed a deal to merge with rival telco giant Orange last year.

As a result, it now appears that Vodafone may be looking to exit the Spanish market entirely, with sources speaking to Bloomberg suggesting that the company has been presented with takeover offers from various suitors, including  Apollo Global Management Inc.

The details of such offers have yet to be revealed, though the sources suggest that Vodafone Spain could be valued at over $4 billion.

Vodafone has not announced any formal intention to sell its Spanish unit, but the sources suggest that the operator will consider offers if the price is right.

The fact that Vodafone Spain is receiving unsolicited takeover offers should not come as too great a surprise given the unit’s perceived vulnerability.

Since the departure of Nick Read, interim CEO Margherita Della Valle has moved to reduce Vodafone Spain’s independence by aggregating it with the company’s wider European Cluster, a group that contains numerous smaller European units like Ireland and Greece. Della Valle says that this move will help to further simplify the Group’s management and revitalise business growth in Spain, with the Cluster under the direct leadership of CEO Serpil Timuray.

As a result of this strategic rebalance, Vodafone Spain’s CEO, Colman Deegan, resigned from his post at the start of this year.

Want to keep up to date with all the latest news from the international telecoms sector? Click here to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter direct to your inbox

Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
Vodafone to cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany
Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

News

CEO Tim Höttges announced the news at the company’s latest shareholder meeting, saying the German operator now owns 50.2% of the US giant

This week, Deutsche Telekom has announced that it has finally achieved it long-term goal of regaining a majority stake in the world’s most valuable mobile network operator, T-Mobile US.

According to Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges, the Group now owns a 50.2% stake in the business, finally achieving the majority ownership goal it first laid out during its 2021 Capital Markets Day

When T-Mobile acquired Sprint three years ago, DT’s stake in the operator stood at 43%,. Since then, Deutsche Telekom has gradually regrown its stake in the US business, reaching 49% in 2022, according to the company’s 2022 Annual Report.

Now, the company has taken the final step to increase this stake to a majority once again.

“We have the majority and are the largest shareholder of the world’s most valuable telecommunications company – T-Mobile U.S.,” announced Höttges in a shareholder meeting this week.

The cost of this increased share is reportedly less than $1 billion in 2023, with Deutsche Telekom estimating that the benefits of the transaction will be between $7.2 and $7.5 billion.

At the shareholders meeting, Höttges also highlighted the Group’s ongoing sustainability efforts, noting the progress that has been made in recent years.

“We emit 94 percent fewer CO2 emissions than in 2017. We aim to be fully climate neutral by 2025. Last year, we reduced our energy consumption in Germany by 278 gigawatt hours – that is 11 percent,” he said. “We want to achieve net zero emissions from the production of cell phones. Anyone who fails to achieve green production will eventually be removed from the line-up. We import devices. But we export our environmental protection standards.”

Deutsche Telekom is aiming for its entire value chain to be carbon neutral by 2040.

Want to keep up to date with all the latest news from the international telecoms sector? Click here to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter direct to your inbox

Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
Vodafone to cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany
Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

News

The test saw drones travel between the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust sites in Coventry and Rugby, in preparation for medical deliveries

This week, BT has announced the latest steps in its ambition to help create the world’s largest drone superhighway, with a new trial seeing drones travel successfully between two Midlands hospitals.

The trial, jointly conducted by Skyfarer Ltd and Medical Logistics UK, was initiated in October 2022.

Using connectivity from BT’s network, the trial saw 130 drone flights conducted on the 32km route between the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust sites. This included travelling in complex airspace, close to urban areas.

Cumulatively, the drones in the trial travelled over 1,900km, including 220km in a single day. Over 30 hours of these flights were beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) – the first time BVLOS drone flight has taken place over-land in the UK.

As well as delivering the obvious benefits of being faster and more direct than comparable car travel between the two locations, drone deliveries will also bring major sustainability benefits; Skyfarer recorded the carbon emissions of a drone delivery as being 99.98% lower than a diesel van and 90.5% lower than an electric van.

“This trial would not have been possible without our consortium of partners. BT Group’s support has enabled a considerable amount of application learning and development, pushing Skyfarer and our consortium closer to a point where turn key long range BVLOS drone operations are an everyday occurrence,” said Georgia Hanrahan, Business Manager, Skyfarer.

“The Skyfarer and BT Group relationship will be the driving force for this revolutionary innovation and its adaption to day-to-day life. With BT Group providing the technology and communications expertise, Skyfarer is able to offer long-range BVLOS capability in return to justify and prove systems.”

BT has been increasing its activity in the drone space for a number of years now, viewing ubiquitous mobile connectivity as a cornerstone for BVLOS drone flight. In fact, last year, a consortium including the operator introduced “Project Skyway”, a plan to build a 165-mile drone corridor spanning Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby.

Since then, BT has expanded its relationship with the consortium’s leader, Unified Traffic Management (UTM) specialist Altitude Angel, by entering into a £5 million deal to help the Altitude Angel scale up its ARROW tower network beyond its initial goals outlined in Project Skyway.

According to BT, the opportunity here is enormous – in healthcare alone, the recent research suggests that commercialised drones could increase the GDP of the sector by £4 billion by 2030.

Perhaps it should comes as no surprise, then, that BT is not the only operator expanding its drone-related activities in recent years, with both Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom among the major telecoms players helping to develop this ecosystem.

How will mobile networks enable commercialised drone flight? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Connected North conference

Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
Vodafone to cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany
Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

Press Release

NTT Ltd., a leading global IT infrastructure and services company, today announced the launch of its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) security service to help companies achieve business performance objectives through improved cyber resilience. The cloud-native, analytics-driven offering combines human and machine expertise with leading technologies and threat intelligence to reduce the mean time to detect and respond to cyber-attacks.

The MDR service is built on Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft’s leading next-gen security information and event management (SIEM) platform, powered by AI, automation, and threat intelligence. Sentinel enables organizations to collect data at scale across all users, devices, apps, and infrastructure, both on-prem and in multicloud environments.

Using analytics, machine learning, and threat intelligence, the service hunts for suspicious activities and minimizes false positives. With built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks, enterprises can respond to incidents rapidly and remotely isolate threats.

This latest offering represents another step forward in NTT and Microsoft’s multi-year Strategic Alliance Agreement (SCA) signed in 2020. Since then, the two companies have collaborated to build advanced solutions in public, private and edge cloud, data & AI, digital & app innovation, modern workplace, and now most recently in security.

With over 25 years of Microsoft experience, including 5000+ Microsoft engineers, and more than 10,000 Microsoft certifications, NTT provides an advanced combination of application and systems integration, advisory and managed cloud, and security services that are built using Microsoft platforms and can be delivered globally.

“Organizations are typically utilizing a patchwork of security technologies that lack alignment,” said Charlie Li, Senior Executive Vice President: Managed Cloud and Infrastructure Services, NTT Ltd. “This disjointed approach has left businesses often unable to detect hard-to-find threats and lacking the necessary agility to mitigate them. Many are simply adding more security layers, increasing complexity, and generating even more logs and alerts that go untreated.”

“NTT’s MDR service helps organizations stay ahead of attackers and has a direct impact on workforce productivity and customer satisfaction through real-time and long-term threat correlation, advanced analytics, and continuous monitoring of digital transactions. It delivers a strong cyber-resilience posture, directly impacting an organization’s operational, financial, and resource resilience,” he added.

“Our research indicates that IT security professionals are in high demand, largely driven by more threats that have sprouted with the expansion of today’s hybrid workforce and the magnitude of the increased volume of digital transactions impacting businesses,” said Craig Robinson, Research VP, International Data Corporation (IDC). “MDR services are greatly assisting organizations in taking a pro-active stance to protect all forms of digital transactions and providing those organizations with high-impact, real-time, advanced analytics and professionals 24X7X365.”

“We’re extremely pleased to expand on our existing strategic relationship with NTT through the launch of the new MDR service, based on Microsoft Sentinel, to further help protect and support our joint customers,” said Csaba Deme, General Manager, Global Security Sales at Microsoft.

NTT is well-positioned to enhance its strategic partnership with Microsoft, having earned the esteemed Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider status, as well as 8 Specializations. NTT is a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) and boasts a strong legacy with over 20 Microsoft Partner Awards, including the prestigious Partner of the Year.

The global managed detection and response market size is predicted to increase from $2.6B in 2022 to $5.6B by 2027. Some of the factors that are driving market growth include shortage of skilled cyber security professionals and budget constraints, government regulations, and strict compliance for adoption of MDR services.

NTT’s MDR base service includes service tiers and deployment options, as well as support for add-ons that provide additional capabilities to expand detection capabilities and response actions. Current add-ons are MDR for Endpoint and Security Device Management (SecDM) for MDR, for Security Devices and Services.

NEWS

Today, the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has seen fit to increase the amount of automatic compensation via cash or bill credits for loss of connectivity and delivery delays.  

The system is voluntary for home broadband ISPs, first launched on 1st April 2019, designed to compensate consumers for delayed repairs following connectivity failures. Originally, if a connectivity outage was not fixed in 2 working days the compensation was set at £8.40 per day over this, with missed appointments also potentially awarding £26.24 to the consumer. Delay to starting new services also incurred a charge of £5.25 per day.  

All these rates are now set to increase in line with inflation from the 1st of April annually, based on the Consumer Price Index from 31st Oct the previous year, which was around 11%. This means ISPs signed up to this system will now pay £9.33 per day for delayed repairs, £29.15 for missed appointments, and £5.83 per day if delaying the start of a new service.  

Most Major ISPs do support the system with big names such as BT, EE, Plusnet, Hyperoptic, Sky Broadband (plus NOW Broadband), Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Utility Warehouse, Vodafone (Openreach’s network only), and Zen Internet already signed up.

What with many providers feeling the squeeze of the general increase in bills, this could well put off more ISPs from joining this still voluntary scheme. Smaller providers will be even more unlikely to sign up given the costs and technical hurdles required to support the scheme. However, customers of providers might not need to worry, as some ISPs outside the scheme do provide their own approaches to compensation.  

Want to learn more about UK connectivity and engage with the full ecosystem? Connected North will be kicking off this April 17-18 and is poised to have key regional stakeholders discuss policy, regulations, competition, technology, and more. Click here to book your place today.

NEWS

Ovo Energy is reported planning to acquire Shell Energy Retail, which in addition to supplying gas and electricity to 1.4 million households, also has a fixed broadband base numbering around 500,000 subscriptions

If Ovo’s bid is successful, it would once again make it the second largest energy supplier in the UK market, and follows the high-profile acquisition of SSE’s retail division back in 2019, and marks Shell’s exit from the broader European retail energy market. The company is also, according to industry sources, keen to offload it’s broadband arm, and with OVO not having a foothold in the sector, this will likely be one of the first outcomes of any deal. OVO previously sold SSE’s telecoms division to TalkTalk. There have also been reports that Centrica, the owner of British Gas and the UK’s largest energy supplier, are considering a bid which would prove controversial.

Any deal for the latter would mark increasing consolidation in the UK broadband market with several providers having merged or bought outright over the last few months, and with M&A becoming an increasingly dominant theme within the UK market, any sale of Shell’s broadband arm will add to the conversation.

Learn more about how the UK market dynamics are changing at this year’s Connected Britain which is being held at the ExCel in London on September 20 & 21

Startup Stories

Tell us about your start up

Telco is our core sector, primarily fast growing Altnets, because they must scale their business as fast as possible, which means going through several phases of business transformation with the clock ticking… the Department of Culture Media and Sport noted “The sector needs to grow 3x over the next 4 years to meet government targets. A massive a challenge first hit by COVID then the current macro-economics.

Investment into the sector is available, but finance alone will not resolve two groups of issues that are currently preventing growth at the required level.

The first group of issues is outside the office and includes obtaining consent and physical access to premises from the property owners, which is proving to be a major practical difficulty for providers, or consent to provide the infrastructure, whether that’s digging trenches in roads, attaching wires to telegraph poles or Wayleave Agreements. Once the work is underway, there is a national shortage of skilled workers capable of building full fibre.

The second issue group is inside the office. Most Altnets have yet to modernise their back-office project operations with repeatable standardised processes that scales, to improve the efficiency of onboarding new resource and make the most of the talent already in place. Each Altnet has its own way of “making do”, with labour-intensive legacy software, such as spreadsheets, Gantt charts, PowerPoint TM, email and project delivery processes that vary by Project Manager that are counter-productive to the need to scale.

As Altnets race to scale in size and numbers, the cost per mile, or premises passed, increase, not decrease, through a lack of oversight, efficiency and a skills shortage at every level, resulting in a requirement for significant re-investment, or mergers and acquisitions, to stay in the game. In essence, the level of complexity increases, on every level. As new entrants join the fray, increased competition further drives down revenue, undermines business growth strategies, that then lead to missed targets.

We know this because we focus on the sector and have just conducted our own survey, contacting 100 of the fastest growing Altnets, with a good response across the sector, including some of the biggest players.

The key for Altnets to scale faster is to simplify the management of complex project delivery, particularly for multiple site deliveries, along with compliance and governance. Clearly there is a need for process standardization. To automate much of this work within a single, real-time platform is a challenging puzzle, combining the dark arts of project management, software design, business processes and digital transformation, all with good user experience. Then you have the work itself, as the number of parties and moving parts involved is significant. For those thinking of doing all of this inhouse, it can take years to get right. Most will not have the time, or worse, fail for any number of reasons.

Through working with industry professionals, we have developed EZPS, an easy-to-use turnkey platform that simplifies the complexity of project and portfolio management oversight. The platform is dedicated to helping Altnets meet the challenge of increasing project delivery efficiency, whilst driving cost reductions and resiliently scaling at speed.

What is your USP?

We own our IP which has made standardized implementation end-to-end project oversight possible. We focus specifically on the sector using our industry knowledge to continuously tune the platform, to meet any changing market conditions.

The platform manages the intricacies of different project types, including PIA, in a unique way. It plans, auto updates in real-time, predicts projects/portfolio status and costs every step of the way, with a single source of truth. To deliver a repeatable, homogenous experience, with high automation, voice assist and easy collaboration, irrespective of project type or size, the platform required a certain level of industry-codified knowledge and intelligence.

Our platform provides efficiency savings for all project team personnel and stakeholders, including customers and suppliers, if required. For example, each Project Managers working on one average size project can save 14 hours per week using the SME version of our service. A serious time saving for any growing or under-resourced organisation.

Ninety percent of User Onboarding is 30mins training, to run one project, or large multiple-site projects and programmes, it does not matter.  C-level Executives, even have their own voice assist via their mobile phone, for portfolio and business performance, a world first in project portfolio delivery.

Our platform provides efficiency savings for all project Teams and SME level customers purchasing the service off the web, and only pay for the number of users. Any additional new functions, modules, AI, business analytics or automation comes free of charge at those service levels.

Our purpose is to help every single customer unleash their full potential in order to achieve their definition of success, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?

We have a long-combined history in telecoms (and other industry sectors), working as independent business change consultants and contractor project managers with BT Global Services, Openreach, Verizon, Spiritel, Level3, Adapt, Vodafone, Touchbase, NextGenAccess and Cisco. We like a challenge, being problem solvers and solution providers.

How have you got to your current stage of development? (role of accelerators, partners etc)

Marketing and sales do not come naturally to us, although we are learning. Thirteen years ago, we pitched the platform concept to 50 companies, in different market sectors. 12 said if we built it, they would buy it. We thought great. We raised private investment to build a real-time core business process modelling engine, built the first platform then… no-one bought, for many reasons, from the financial crash, to not trusting their business data to be stored in the cloud. At the time, less than 1% of apps were B2B. Although we crashed and burned, we kept the platform alive… hosted, as we knew we had something, and then went back to our day jobs of consulting.

A couple of years ago, I was called out of the blue by an Altnet Executive we previously pitched to, asking if we still have the platform, as he couldn’t find anything comparable. At the time, I was two years into working for a global manufacturer doing business change from a nice Mayfair office and flying to challenging parts of the world. I like to finish what I started, so politely turn the Altnet down, saying if my co-founder says yes, then I will say yes.

Two years later, after we built a bespoke platform for our first Altnet, we quickly worked out a scalable industry standard turnkey platform called EZPS, which can be purchased off the web, at Team and SME level, or bespoke at the Enterprise level. We are self-financing and growing organically, with most of our finance re-invested into R&D, as we are constantly working on enhanced products and services, inside and outside the project world.

Why did you establish the business?

My core background is manufacturing, in various sectors. For me, back in 2007, when I first worked in Telecoms, I was shocked at the areas of waste and how it affected not only the profit margin, but also the stress on people at all levels of the business right to the top. My employer at the time were not the only ones operating this way.

My co-founder and I have worked together in telecoms over the years, and our experience has made it easy for us to see what the issues are, and how to overcome them using innovation.

Back then, we knew others had the same kind of issues. We worked out what needed to be done but could not find software that would do the job. Most project management software packages were manual planning tools, updated for an audience of one… the Project Manager, with no real-time view, or were finance tools following the money with bolt-on project planning and a serious time lag on project status issues.

Even now, most of our competitors have migrated and evolved these legacy shelfware systems to the cloud and thus have constraints that do not lend themselves well to managing complex projects and industry-specific requirements. They lack automation, are resource hungry and a challenge to scale, even when using API’s. For many newer platforms, some doing really well, but they are either heavyweight generalists, or too lightweight to deal with the requirements in the telecoms sector, such as Openreach A55s.

Who inspired you? Do you have a mentor?

My co-founder and I have been lucky to have worked for some interesting people and their companies. For me, I have worked for and directly reported to old and new school serial entrepreneurs. A key early mentor for me is 10 years with Richard Cyzer (contemporary friend of Maurice & Charles Saatchi), who taught me how to run end to end, a high volume multiple-site manufacturing operations from product design to delivery on the high street shelf for the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury, M&S etc. In return, I brought in innovation from other industries, and we grew the business from 43% to 75% of the UK market share in less than 5 years. Those fundamentals have allowed me to work in different industry sectors ever since. My co-founder is inspired by international internet marketing exponents such as Mark Joyner, John Lee, Vince Tan and Igor Kheifets and is currently.

What does the future hold for your business?

Our core and loyalty will always be the Telecoms industry, it got us going, is dynamic, challenging and fun to be in. We aim to be the project delivery platform service provider of choice for Altnets to deliver their business strategy to help the industry players meet their own targets and those targets set by Ofcom.

We have also come to the attention of organisations in a range of other industry sectors. One example is for the last year, we have been working at scale, with a multinational called Publicis and their group of companies (which includes Saatchi & Saatchi). By taking a consultative approach and providing Publicis with a responsive, bespoke solution that’s solving some unique challenges, we have and become an approved platform service provider in a very dynamic business environment.

We have our growth plan mapped out and aim to be in the infinite game, doing our part for UK industry.

To find out more about EZPS, meet them at this year’s Connected North in Manchester on 17-18 April where they will be exhibiting in the startup village.

Also in the news:

Brks doubles customers in Manchester FTTP deployment

FCC talks ‘big picture items’ at Connected America 2023

Ericsson snags 5G mmWave speed record with Faroese Telecom

NEWS

Alternative network provider Brsk are progressing well with their new gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network as they announced hitting 1,000 customers across Manchester. This is a 100% increase from December 2022 when they had 500 sign-ups in the area.  

The Manchester deployment, which Brsk started building early last year, now serves customers across South Manchester, including Stockport, Sale, Didsbury, Edgeley, Reddish, Withington, Burnage, Heaton Mersey, and Parrs Wood.  

This is good progress for one of the UK’s fastest growing altnets with their related press release stating “it’s been a very successful period overall for us, with our network having passed the 150,000 homes mark in recent weeks”.  

Brsk has promised to follow up on this success by aiming to get the following areas online in short order; Stretford, Cheadle, Gatley, Rusholme, Levenshulme, Longsight, Chorlton, Wilmslow, Wythenshawe, Timperley, and Altrincham.  

With plans of passing 1 million homes by 2026, Brsk are treating milestones like this as sign to the market that they are on track to meet their ambitious goals.  

This could be good news for local residents looking for an alternative provider, especially with regular promotional discounts throughout the year, including free setup and installation (worth £150) for every customer along with frozen prices for existing customers in 2023 as well. Altnets like Brsk are proving to be a welcome force behind driving gigabit capable internet across the North. 

For more on connectivity across the North of the UK, there is no better place to engage with the industry and top regional players than Connected North 2023, April 17-18. Tickets are on sale now and you won’t want to miss the agenda!