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

Press Release

Growing Sussex milestone gives farmers near real-time insight into livestock-building conditions, supporting animal welfare and farm resilience

West Sussex County Council is leading the way in smart livestock monitoring. Through the public sector-led Growing Sussex programme, it is partnering with Boldyn Networks (Boldyn) and agritech specialist Pneumonitor, to connect Pneumonitor’s in-pen environmental monitoring device to Boldyn’s private 5G network. The deployment gives farmers near real-time insight into conditions inside livestock buildings, helping them identify and respond more quickly to environmental factors that may increase the risk of respiratory disease and animal stress.

Unlike sensors typically mounted on walls, Pneumonitor measures conditions within the pen, where the animals are. Connected through 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) technology, the device can share timely information from livestock buildings and support practical, scalable monitoring across farms.

The deployment comes as repeated heatwaves across parts of the UK and Europe place greater pressure on livestock and farm operations. By helping farmers understand how conditions are changing, the technology can support earlier action, animal health and welfare, productivity and long-term resilience.

Cllr Yvonne Gravely, Cabinet Member for Economy and Skills at West Sussex County Council, said: “Agriculture plays a vital role in West Sussex, but periods of extreme weather are creating new challenges for the sector. Through Growing Sussex, we’re helping growers and food producers use technology to better understand changing conditions, protect animal welfare and build resilience for the future. That’s good for local businesses, good for our rural economy and good for West Sussex.”

Gearoid Collins, Commercial Director, Real Estate, Enterprise & Wind Farms at Boldyn Networks, said: “As the connectivity partner for Growing Sussex, we’re committed to helping shape a new era for agriculture and deploy technologies that bring a welcome boost to the West Sussex economy. Connecting Pneumonitor through RedCap shows how private 5G can support practical agritech and provide the digital foundation for many more connected applications across the farming sector.”

Isaac Orr, Chief Executive Officer at Pneumonitor, said: “With heatwaves becoming more frequent, conditions inside livestock buildings can deteriorate faster than they can be spotted by eye. Pneumonitor measures conditions in the pen itself, where the animals are, rather than at the wall where sensors are usually mounted. This project showed when heat load was building and what could be done before yields were affected. The connectivity behind the deployment now allows us to bring this monitoring to far more sites than before. We thank Boldyn Networks and the Growing Sussex programme for their partnership.”

Bringing advanced wireless technology to the farm

RedCap is designed for IoT devices that do not require the full capabilities of standard 5G. It combines 5G connectivity with lower power consumption, reduced battery requirements and longer device life, helping lower maintenance needs and operating costs for farm-based deployments.

Growing Sussex was established by West Sussex County Council to co-develop and showcase practical uses of 5G, IoT and AI across food, drink and agricultural production. The programme brings together local government, specialist education providers and technology partners, with input from growers and livestock producers.

Boldyn Networks and West Sussex County Council announced plans for four private 5G networks in 2024. All four Growing Sussex partner sites were live by December 2025. The Pneumonitor integration adds livestock-building environmental monitoring to the programme’s wider connected-agriculture ecosystem.

How can the latest in connectivity technology reinvigorate British agriculture? Join the discussion at Connected Britain, the UK’s largest digital economy event

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 Miha Ušeničnik, Associate Director at DFG CONSULTING

Telecom automation is moving beyond predefined tasks towards networks that can increasingly analyse conditions, make decisions and act autonomously. Self-configuration for provisioning, closed-loop optimisation, and automated fault recovery promise greater operational efficiency and reliability, while enabling services to be provisioned and adapted with less manual intervention.

The transition is already underway. According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and TM Forum: Navigating autonomous networks, 73% of network executives surveyed said their organisations had developed phased roadmaps towards autonomous operations. Yet only 6% of CSPs reported operating highly autonomous Level 4 network instances. Within three years, 22% expect to reach that level.

What must change to bridge that gap? It starts with data. As a data transformation company, DFG CONSULTING focuses on the quality and trustworthiness of the physical network data that automation depends on.

When the network and its data diverge

Telecom networks have evolved continuously over decades, but the data describing them has not always kept pace. Network extensions, technology changes, mergers and system migrations have left many operators with information distributed across multiple systems and formats.

Critical network information may still reside in CAD or Visio drawings, PDFs, raster images and spreadsheets alongside central inventory systems. While valuable to engineers, this unstructured information cannot readily support automation.

The challenge goes deeper than format. Field changes are not always accurately reflected in the system of record, creating discrepancies between as-planned and as-built networks.

Missing or incorrect connectivity creates further uncertainty. Engineers and field teams may consequently maintain local “shadow documentation” to capture information that is missing, outdated or difficult to retrieve from the system of record.

The problem is therefore often not the absence of data, but whether operators can trust that it accurately represents the physical network and whether it is in the right form for growing network automation and autonomy.

The consequences of inaccurate data

Experienced engineers might still recognise when a network record does not reflect reality and question it before acting. Automated operations do not necessarily have that safeguard because they cannot recognise inaccurate data.

Physical assets do not have intelligence, telemetry, or at least some form of active communication. They cannot report their state. They cannot self-discover. They cannot tell an inventory system where they are, how they’re connected, or whether they were built to design. Automated decisions solely rely on a trustworthy, precise, end-to-end digital representation of all available physical assets.

Incorrect data can lead to an incorrect path calculation, affecting service provisioning or instructions for field teams. Inaccurate connectivity can result in flawed impact analysis and the wrong customers or services being identified during an outage.

Intelligent data migration

Recognising the need for trustworthy data is the easy part — the challenge is quality, scale, efficiency and continuity. Operators may hold hundreds of thousands of legacy files accumulated over decades, while new documentation keeps arriving, often incomplete, inconsistent or conflicting, and daily operations cannot pause while this data is transformed.

The question becomes: how can operators convert, validate, and reconcile network data at scale while updating operational data on the fly?

Physical network documentation is naturally fragmented across distinct views — spatial maps, schematics and splice diagrams — each describing the same elements at a different level of detail. Manually redrawing legacy files into operational support systems is common, but a more effective approach is to use a specialised tool Interactively Assisted Converter™ that extracts data from legacy drawings and structures it in a machine-readable format, ready for direct ingestion into the system of record.

This tool can cross-reference and merge disparate views into a single dataset, with AI adapting to the multiple drawing standards different data providers use. Data conversion is fundamentally a cleaning process: automation extracts, structures, and resolves quality issues for most of the data, while human oversight handles conflicting edge cases — far more reliable than manual redrawing, which is resource-intensive and prone to replicating existing mistakes into the central system of record.

Keeping humans in control

As autonomous systems make decisions at a scale and speed humans cannot replicate, engineers may struggle to understand and independently validate them. Human-readable network connectivity visualisation therefore becomes more important, not less: data transformation gives us machine-operational data, but at the cost of human readability.

The answer isn’t another manually maintained layer of “shadow” documentation. Instead, iNTERACTIVE SCHEMATICS™ can automatically generate high-level and low-level network diagrams directly from the same inventory data used for automation — providing a real-time visual representation from the single source of truth.

Network connectivity visualisation is now evolving from documentation into a control and validation layer between automated systems and engineers, turning trusted digital data into an interactive operational view to support design, planning, troubleshooting, maintenance, and service provisioning.

Trust before autonomy

Autonomous networks are not only about making machines more intelligent. They also require a trustworthy representation of the physical network and the human visibility needed to understand and validate manual and automated decisions.

As network operators move towards higher levels of autonomy, the strategic question is:

Do we have an effective, trustworthy and scalable way to convert, validate, reconcile and visualise the physical network data on which network operations depend?

DFG CONSULTING can help you answer that question.

We can assess a representative sample of your own data to identify quality gaps, transformation opportunities and potential process improvements — and determine what it takes to make your network data trusted and automation-ready.

Contact miha.usenicnik@dfgcon.si to arrange an initial assessment or meet us at Connected Britain 2026 on 9–10 September.

Miha Ušeničnik has spent more than two decades working across telecommunications, technology development and operational transformation.

He has held senior technical and management positions in telecom and technology companies, including responsibility for broadband network development and WiMAX systems, and contributed to national broadband policy as principal author of Slovenia’s Broadband Strategy.

At DFG CONSULTING, his focus is on helping network operators transform complex network data into trusted, structured information that can support more efficient operations, automation and AI.

Press Release

Vodafone Business, the enterprise arm of VodafoneThree, has announced a partnership with Tech Mahindra, a leading global provider of technology consulting and digital solutions to enterprises across industries, reinforcing its commitment to helping organisations across the UK accelerate digital transformation and realise the benefits of emerging technologies.

Building on VodafoneThree’s £11bn investment to create the UK’s best network for business – and provide organisations with the secure, resilient and scalable digital foundations they need to modernise and grow – the agreement establishes a structured model for executive engagement, co-innovation and go-to-market collaboration. It will enable both organisations to identify and develop opportunities where their complementary capabilities can help customers simplify operations, modernise technology environments and deliver measurable business outcomes.

By combining Vodafone Business’ enterprise and digital infrastructure capabilities with Tech Mahindra’s expertise in AI-led technology transformation, systems integration, digital engineering and managed services, the two organisations will develop industry-led propositions for UK customers. The collaboration will leverage AI, automation, private 5G, IoT, cloud and data to modernise operations, strengthen resilience, accelerate digital adoption and unlock new business models.

Tech Mahindra has a strong UK presence, combining local market expertise with global capabilities in AI, digital engineering, cloud and data. Guided by its “AI Delivered Right” strategy, Tech Mahindra helps organisations move AI from experimentation to enterprise-scale adoption and measurable outcomes. Through this partnership with Vodafone Business, both organisations will combine their strengths to help UK businesses modernise operations, strengthen resilience and accelerate AI-led growth.

The agreement supports Vodafone Business’ broader strategy to build a strong ecosystem of specialist partners, giving customers access to the expertise and capabilities they need at each stage of their digital transformation. By bringing together enterprise services, digital infrastructure and technology expertise, Vodafone Business is helping organisations adapt to changing market demands, improve operational performance and drive sustainable growth.

Nick Gliddon, Business Director, VodafoneThree, commented: “This partnership with Tech Mahindra brings together the capabilities organisations need to move faster in a complex digital landscape. By combining Vodafone Business’ connectivity, technology and security expertise with Tech Mahindra’s specialist transformation capabilities, we’re strengthening our partner ecosystem and giving customers access to integrated solutions across cloud, AI, cyber security and digital transformation – helping them cut through complexity, build resilience and become more agile, competitive and future-ready.”

Harshul Asnani, President and Head of Europe Business, Tech Mahindra, said: “Tech Mahindra has a deep heritage in telecommunications and extensive experience helping enterprises modernise complex technology and operating environments. This framework with Vodafone Business brings together our complementary strengths to help UK organisations accelerate AI-led transformation. By combining AI, automation, digital engineering and industry expertise, we will help enterprises modernise networks and operations, build resilient digital ecosystems and unlock measurable business outcomes at scale.”

How is the UK telecoms market changing in the UK? Join the discussion at Connected Britain 2026, the UK’s largest digital economy event

Press Release

Today, Huawei and HP Inc. announced the signing of a multiyear global patent cross-licensing agreement, including license to HP Inc. for certain Huawei WiFi patents. This milestone agreement not only reflects the companies’ cooperation in the field of intellectual property licensing but also recognizes Huawei’s innovation capabilities and core technological strength as well as HP’s position as a global leader in computers and peripheral equipment.

Alan Fan, Huawei’s Chief Intellectual Property Officer, stated, “Huawei is pleased to reach this patent cross-licensing agreement with HP Inc. This agreement is a strong testament to Huawei’s persistent independent innovation in cutting-edge fields in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Through patent licensing, Huawei shares its innovation with the industry, particularly in the area of standardized technologies, which brings leading technological experiences to consumers worldwide.”

Steven Geiszler, who represented Huawei in the negotiations, stated: “This is another successful licensing of Huawei patents, particularly in the area of standardized Wi-Fi technologies—while obtaining valuable reciprocal patent rights from HP Inc.  I appreciate the professionalism and courteousness shown by HP’s negotiation team during this project.”

“This is a standard-essential patent license covering Wi‑Fi technology – something used broadly across the industry and routine for companies whose products connect to Wi‑Fi. It is not new, does not represent a broader strategic or commercial relationship, partnership, or collaboration with Huawei,” said HP in an emailed statement.

Wi-Fi has become one of the most widely used wireless technologies in the world, connecting homes, schools, hospitals, offices and public spaces. Each generation of the standard is developed openly, drawing on technical contributions from companies across the industry, and is then made broadly available to implementers.

Although lacking the speed and throughput of newer generations, Wi-Fi 4 and 5 are still widely used, providing reliable networking for less demanding applications.

High speed, large capacity and lower energy consumption enable Wi-Fi 6 to deliver multiple high-definition video streaming, gaming and AR/VR services alongside legacy broadband and IoT devices such as laptops, refrigerators, cameras, doorbells, thermostats, and lightbulbs—all with a single wireless router.

Wi-Fi 7, building on Wi-Fi 6, delivers higher throughput, lower latency, and more reliable Wi-Fi connectivity. These enhancements enable an exceptionally smooth experience for 8K video, gaming, AR/VR, remote work, online video conferencing, and cloud computing.

Together, these advances and applications have made reliable wireless connectivity part of the basic infrastructure of everyday life — supporting remote healthcare, digital education, and more energy-efficient homes and workplaces. Huawei has played a significant role in contributing to the development of Wi-Fi technologies over successive generations and makes the resulting technologies available publicly, so that innovation created in one place can benefit users everywhere.

To learn more about patents and licensing, here is Huawei’s Chief Intellectual Property Officer Alan Fan answering common questions on the topic from the internet. 

The clock is ticking for South Africa’s major mobile network operators to fulfil their legal obligation of zero-rating information and services that carry social value. Companies like MTN, Vodacom and Cell C have been given until 15 January 2027 to make the digital content of public benefit organisations (PBOs) data-free for users.

The zero-rating requirement is not a corporate social responsibility initiative; it’s a condition attached to the multi-billion-rand spectrum auction held by Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) in 2022. The expected revenues foregone were factored into the bid prices by the network operators.  But ICASA has yet to indicate how it intends to hold operators accountable.

In a country with unequal access to the internet and high data costs, the zero-rating of digital content is a bridge across the digital divide that could connect people to information for education, social services, healthcare and job seeking.

“Almost every home in South Africa has a mobile phone, but many in poor communities can’t afford the cost of data. This means the tools for stimulating socio-economic change are out of reach for millions of people in a country where barriers to connectivity and access to information and resources are a systemic choke which reinforces inequality,” explains David Harrison, CEO of the DG Murray Trust (DGMT).

“When content that carries social value is zero-rated, new mothers can access trusted information about breastfeeding and nutrition, preschool teachers can tap into support networks and receive training, and young people can be linked to work opportunities,” Harrison adds.

Some mobile network operators, like RAIN have risen to the occasion by zero-rating at least two dozen organisations. However, across the major operators, only fifteen organisations have been zero-rated out of thousands that may be eligible.

“We are deeply concerned that with the deadline just months away, we’ve had no meaningful communication from most mobile network operators, or from ICASA, about how zero-rating will be implemented, regulated and enforced,” says Busisiwe Kabane-Bailey, Innovation Director at DGMT.

PBOs are vetted and waiting to be zero-rated

Zero-rating is not new to mobile network operators: they were required to zero-rate educational and Covid-related health content of websites under the Covid-19 national disaster regulations. In the years before the pandemic, and since, some operators have zero-rated sites of their own accord.

But where this has happened, implementation was uneven: a site that is data-free on one network may not be on another, or may carry different speed and data limitations. And the content itself was selected at each operator’s discretion, with no shared standard to ensure it delivered the greatest possible educational or health benefit.

DGMT began exploring ways to reduce data costs and expand access to public benefit content as early as 2013, long before zero-rating became a licence condition. To streamline implementation, DGMT operates the Social Innovation Register (SIR), which is designed to review PBO applications by verifying their tax-benefit status according to Schedule 9 of the Income Tax Act and confirming they meet the technical requirements for zero-rating.

The SIR acts as a single source of information for PBOs that have been assessed against the eligibility criteria for zero-rating and aims to reduce the need for mobile network providers to evaluate applications independently. While the SIR itself was only launched in 2023, it is the product of more than a decade of work in this area.

“Since going live, the SIR has processed more than 120 applications, demonstrating that much of the infrastructure needed to drive implementation at scale is already in place. What’s missing is engagement,” says Kabane-Bailey.

“The question is not whether operators can do this but why they haven’t. When zero-rating was required under the Covid-19 disaster regulations, networks implemented it,” she adds.

South Africans have long regarded networks as predatory and for years, consumers complained that data was unaffordable, but prices only came down after the Competition Commission confirmed it. Now, MTN and Vodacom are in court against ICASA over data expiry rules. These repeated push-backs and delays only serve to deepen public mistrust.

“Zero-rating offers operators a chance to restore trust and to accelerate socio-economic development, at modest cost, with the systems already built,” Kabane-Bailey explains.

“We are calling on operators to use the existing systems to fast-track zero-rating before the deadline expires, and to urgently publish their implementation plans,” she concludes.

To arrange interviews, please contact DGMT Communications Specialist Corné Kritzinger on 060 679 7964 or send an email to corne@dgmt.co.za.

About us: DGMT is a South African foundation built on endowments from Douglas and Eleanor Murray. As a public innovator through strategic investment, DGMT is committed to developing South Africa’s potential. To this end, DGMT has identified 10 opportunities to escape the inequality trap and build a thriving society. These opportunities span early childhood development, innovation amongst civil society organisations, youth development, preventing nutritional stunting and promoting literacy.

News

Over 9,000 additional premises were passed last month as a direct result of the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme

In a timely update ahead of Connected Britain next month, Building Digital UK (BDUK) has today published an update on the progress of various contracts as part of the £5 billion Project Gigabit broadband rollout initiative.

The data, as of August 17, suggests that 296,770 contracted premises have now been delivered, up from 287,510 in July 2026. This represents around 35% of the 846,770 premises covered by existing contracts.

The government release notes that these figures are meant only as a rough indication of progress, noting that the ‘variable time lag between contract signature/delivery and data ingestion by BDUK’ means they may not be strictly accurate. The reported figures have also been rounded to the nearest 10.

The agency also highlighted that the figures should not be directly compared to those published in BDUK’s annual Delivery Performance report earlier this summer; those results, showing 1.42 million premises passed, refer to premises passed with the support of any public or BDUK-related subsidy, rather than solely the GIS programme.

Backed by £5 billion in public funding, Project Gigabit was first introduced in 2021with the aim of supporting the government’s gigabit-capable broadband targets. Those targets have evolved substantially over the past five years but are now set at 99% of premises passed with gigabit-capable broadband technology by 2032.

The UK currently has gigabit-capable broadband coverage of around 90%, with the 36 current Project Gigabit contracts aimed primarily at supporting rollout to the final 10%.

In short, the programme continues to make steady progress, but the lion’s share of the work remains to be done and will only become more difficult as the target locations become increasingly difficult to reach.

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