News

Applicants must provide a compelling element of matched funding to be eligible.

This week the UK Space Agency unveiled a £42 million grant call aimed at driving innovation in satellite communications and positioning the UK as a primary supplier for global low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations.

Managed through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the third call targets key high-volume constellation technologies, including optical links, active antennas, regenerative processing, and advanced user terminals.

The agency plans to award grants ranging between £4 million and £25 million per project, with all successful applicants required to provide matched industry funding.

The first stage of applications closes on 7 September 2026, with final outcomes to be notified by December.

Some AI tools assisted in the crafting of this report.

Partner Article 

If you have attended any Mobile World Congress event in recent years, you will never have been far away from a robot. From mechanical dogs prowling the halls at trade shows to robotic baristas serving coffee, robots have long been a novel way to demonstrate the power of mobile technology. 

With the advent of AI, however, the embodied AI is being springboarded towards practical deployments, with autonomous operations becoming increasingly viable. From Honor’s humanoid robot ‘Lightning’, which broke the human world record for a half-marathon earlier this year, to robot dogs helping provide security at the FIFA World Cup, the robotic era is almost upon us. AI that had once been confined to a phone or laptop screen will soon be making the leap to the physical world. 

What does that boom in physical AI mean for networks? 

At MWC Shanghai 2026’s 5G-A Industry Evolution Summit, discussions around 5G-Advanced (5G-A) were no longer focussed on simply greater speed and capacity, instead presenting the technology as a foundational layer upon which the emerging physical AI ecosystem would be built.  

But fully supporting multi-modal agents, real-time digital twins, and autonomous humanoid robotics will rely on more than a simple upgrade. Operators will be required to radically re-engineer the underlying 5G network, prioritising low latency, uplink and efficiency more than ever before.  

This paradigm shift will be a major challenge for the mobile industry, but it could offer a huge reward: the creation of a token-based business model that could lead a path to growth.  

Building symmetrical networks for happy robots  

Perhaps the most significant change represented by the advent of embodied AI is the greater demand for uplink. 

For many years, mobile networks have been designed for a downlink-heavy world dominated by consumer video streaming and web browsing. With the rapid rise of AI, however, this architectural norm is being overthrown. 

Humanoid robotics, autonomous industrial vehicles, and multi-modal AI terminals will all rely on evaluating large amounts of data – often from numerous sources in varied media – in real-time. This will require rapid compute capabilities to ensure the near-instant response times crucial for autonomous activity.  

The most basic solution for this would be to simply place the required compute capabilities on the device itself, whether that is a customer smartphone or a robotic sentry dog. The problem, however, is that running power-hungry GPUs directly on these devices destroys their battery life and commercial viability.  

“High energy consumption and the resulting short battery life is a limiting factor,” said Chen Qi, president of AI product line at TD Tech, a company she described as “a robotic brain business”. “Using a robotic brain [in the device] takes around 20-times more energy during autonomous activity than operating it remotely. We shouldn’t be putting that pressure on terminals – we should use the cloud and put that pressure on the networks.” 

Networks will therefore be required to balancing downlink and uplink, ensuring that a minimum level of uplink capacity is delivered to all connected AI terminal devices. Global operators are gradually reaching a consensus that 20Mbps uplink will become the baseline technical requirement to sustain real-time AI modelling, situational awareness, and digital twins.  

In a world full of AI terminals – 15 billion by 2035, according to Huawei’s Intelligent World 2035 report – 5G-A will be essential to ensuring that level of uplink at scale and maintaining cloud-edge synergy.  

“Scaling autonomous intelligence puts a lot of pressure on our networks,” said Yang Lifan, Deputy General Manager of China Unicom Beijing. “We can handle two cameras per robot, but what about eight? We can support five robots at the site, but what about a hundred operating simultaneously? We need to highly optimise our 5G-A networks for these conditions and that means a much greater focus on uplink.”  

It is no coincidence that Huawei launched its GigaUplink solution at the event, using multi-antenna technology upgrades and new algorithms to deliver a five-fold increase in uplink capacity. 

Beyond changes to throughput demand, the latency requirements of embodied AI are fundamentally different from consumer internet use. When a robot or autonomous vehicle interacts with human environments, it requires human-like response latencies – around 650ms – to ensure safety and precision. As a result, best-effort network delivery will soon be obsolete for B2B industrial use cases, with deterministic performance becoming an essential network feature. 

“Big bandwidth, uplink expansion, and user experience guarantee. Those will be the key network features that enable the mobile AI era,” said Eric Yang, President of Huawei Carrier Business. 

A call for Upper 6GHz spectrum 

Shifting network architecture strategy is only half of the battle for delivering continuous coverage for a rapidly AI ecosystem. Spectrum bottlenecks are a major concern, with additional capacity required to ensure ubiquitous smooth service.  

At the Summit, securing continuous midband spectrum was seen as foundational for delivering multidimensional experiences, with the upper 6GHz (U6G, 6.425–7.125 GHz) band positioned as a key resource. It offers a strong combination of both coverage and capacity, complementing existing mid-band 5G spectrum and bridging the gap to 6G.  

This call for access to U6G comes during an ongoing global debate about the future of the band. U6G is highly coveted by the Wi-Fi industry to relieve pressure on the crowded 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. However, as Tim Hatt, Head of Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence, points out “mobile is much more likely to be capacity constrained than Wi-Fi.”  

“We should actively promote U6G and align it with C-band, while refarming lower bands for even more capacity,” argued David Li, President of Huawei’s TDD Product Line. “U6G is the second-best spectrum for widespread 5G-A deployment after C-band (3.4–4.0 GHz). With improvements to our technology, we will soon be able to make the U6G coverage as good as C-band.”  

In tandem with U6G access, refarming spectrum in the legacy 2G and 4G bands will also be a priority. By pooling these frequencies through advanced carrier aggregation, they can deliver the ultra-wide bands that 5G-A demands, creating a robust foundation for mobile AI use.  

Tokens: A way out of the ‘volume trap’? 

Monetising 5G often appears to be an evergreen challenge for the mobile industry. Despite widespread 5G deployment and coverage reaching over 99% in premium testbeds like Hong Kong, global ARPU has consistently stagnated. The boom in AI terminals, however, is set to expose a fundamental economic disparity between raw data transmission and AI computational workloads.  

Under the traditional volume-based business model, operators generate minimal revenue from a gigabyte of data, even though transmitting the millions of AI tokens inside that data requires immense network resources and drives up computational electricity costs. By re-engineering network pipelines around token transmission rather than bytes, telcos can bundle, resell, route, secure, and bill for AI capacity in ways that reduce friction for customers and create new recurring revenue. 

“The industry is moving towards token monetisation models,” said Yang, noting that Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) frameworks would allow operators to offer tier-based, deterministic service guarantees based on user location, application profiles, and precise latency requirements. 

In this way, Huawei argues that operators need to evolve beyond the pure connectivity layer, becoming an orchestrator of not only data traffic but of compute power. 

“A byte-plus-token strategy will redefine commercial value for operators. In the future, the difference between data traffic and tokens will continue to grow. We must be ready to embrace that, both with how we build networks and how we monetise them,” said Li.  

Using 5G-A to embrace the future 

The consensus from MWC Shanghai 2026 suggests that an AI-native ecosystem requires a fundamental realignment of the mobile ecosystem, requiring both infrastructure upgrades and a shift to new commercial models. The additional speed, capacity, flexibility, and reliability of 5G-A – supported by additional spectrum in the U6G band – will provide an ideal foundation for the monetisation of the token economy. 

By acting as the unified orchestrators of both spectrum and computational power, telcos can step out of the volume trap and secure their place as the indispensable backbone of the physical AI revolution.

Contributed Article

Regional operator htp built fiber–to–the–home (FTTH) networks a decade before they became mainstream. Today, it is showing the market how early builders modernize for the future. 

The operators who moved first on fiber are now facing a second strategic decision. Speaking at the BREKO Arbeitstag in a joint session with Udo Abt, senior consultant of sales engineering at Calix, Jochen Krauss, head of network planning at Hannover-based regional operator htp, explained how an early FTTH pioneer is evolving its network for the next decade. 

htp began deploying fiber to the home more than ten years ago and today serves 123.400 residential and 9.710 business customers. Sixty-three percent of its connections are now activated fiber-to-the-home lines, a penetration level most of the German market is still working toward. Originally built on point-to-point Ethernet, the network is now evolving. Today, htp is deploying native XGS-PON for all new construction and network densification. 

A business case with real numbers 

Before committing, htp ran a full total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis spanning network build and operations. The results showed a cost reduction of more than 40 percent. According to Krauss, realized savings have exceeded the model. 

The drivers are structural. Serving 2,000 subscribers on point-to-point requires around 32 rack units of central office equipment. XGS-PON requires roughly one rack unit. Power consumption per subscriber is significantly lower. Distributed splitters also eliminate many powered and cooled street cabinets, allowing the field network to run almost entirely passive. Service activation no longer requires technicians at both ends of the line. 

Why native XGS-PON 

htp evaluated GPON and Combo-PON alternatives before committing to native XGS-PON, in what Abt described on stage as “a battle of the best arguments between the two engineering teams.” Symmetric 10 Gbps capacity supports 1:64 split ratios without compromising the subscriber experience. ONT prices for XGS-PON also fell faster than any forecast predicted, closing the historic cost gap with GPON. The choice also secures the road ahead: The step to 50G PON can run in parallel on the same infrastructure when business services and backhaul demand it. 

Just as important were htp’s procurement requirements: no lock-in on optical components, open management interfaces, and hardware available for hardened outdoor deployment. Calix met all of them. 

Simplicity as strategy 

For a 250-person operator, operational simplicity determines technology choices. Because the Calix One™ platform abstracts the access technology, htp’s team configures PON services in the same familiar terms as Ethernet, and the engineer who introduced the platform completed his first test installation within just one week. Workflows are learned once; technology generations change underneath them. As Abt put it, “That is what consumers already expect from their smartphones, where 4G became 5G without anyone relearning the device.” 

The same principle extends forward. htp’s path to 50G PON, network slicing, and AI-supported predictive operations runs on the software foundation already integrated and already mastered. 

A planned evolution, not a crisis 

htp will continue operating its point-to-point base while migrating it to PON in a structured, multi-year program aligned with equipment lifecycles. New builds are XGS-PON by default. As Krauss observed, “Technology generations turning over is simply the nature of infrastructure, and the advantage belongs to operators who plan the transition rather than react to it.” 

For the many European operators now approaching the ten-year mark on their first fiber deployments, the message from the BREKO stage was clear: The second migration is coming for everyone. htp is proof it can arrive as a plan. 

Interview

The Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) in-depth investigation into the proposed £2 billion merger of Netomnia and nexfibre has become one of the most significant competition cases in the UK’s telecoms sector in recent years.

Last month, the regulator confirmed it would fast-track the deal directly to a Phase 2 investigation, bypassing the initial Phase 1 review. The decision reflects the scale of a transaction that could reshape the UK’s altnet market and accelerate long-awaited consolidation.

With the investigation now well underway, Netomnia CEO Jeremy Chelot insists the merger is a necessity for securing long-term viability of the UK’s fibre market.

Consolidation is inevitable

Chelot explained the transaction was driven by the realities of the UK’s increasingly challenging altnet landscape rather than by a deliberate preference for nexfibre.

“It was not so much a choice. It was the fact that the UK market clearly needs consolidation,” he said.

According to Chelot, Netomnia had spent years exploring alternative consolidation opportunities, all of which had ultimately failed.

“We looked at quite a few players and tried to acquire companies to consolidate, and unfortunately, we failed at it. We also looked at opportunities to merge or be acquired by players bigger than us. Through those processes, Nexfibre was the only viable option from a valuation, capital, and overall perspective,” he said.

Despite the increasing pressure facing the sector, Chelot said the objective has remained unchanged since the UK’s fibre challengers first emerged.

“The goal since the beginning—and I think that’s what all the altnets had as an ambition when they started, whether you talk to CityFibre, Community Fibre, or us—was always to become a challenger and beat Openreach,” he said.

Phase 2: The sooner the better

Regarding the decision to request a move directly to Phase 2 of the CMA’s investigation, Chelot said that a swift conclusion was important not only for the deal’s viability, but also to reduce market uncertainty.

“This is a landmark, important transaction for the UK that will shape the future of broadband and telecom in the country,” he said. “If you do a Phase 1 investigation and end up going into Phase 2, you’re talking about a process that could last 18 months. Whereas if you fast-track it immediately, the process is going to be a lot shorter, giving additional time for the CMA and Ofcom to investigate thoroughly and address the important issues.”

Overcoming competition concerns

The merger has faced criticism from rival altnets, most notably CityFibre, which has raised concerns about the impact on competition and re-establishing a duopoly of BT and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2).

Chelot, however, argued that CityFibre’s comments in a recent article in The Times undermine their objections around competition.

“CityFibre was saying that they would consider being acquired by nexfibre or VMO2, but they would rather get the VMO2 traffic onto their platform. If CityFibre says that, they’re basically saying that my transaction is completely fine, because they are saying that having VMO2 traffic on their network, or being acquired by Nexfibre or VMO2, is a good [competitive] outcome,” he said.

He also downplayed concerns around network overlap between Netomnia and nexfibre, saying that fibre duplication between the two networks is limited to “a low double-digit number.”

Instead, he believes the merged business presents little risk to competition because neither Netomnia, nexfibre nor VMO2 is currently a significant wholesale provider to the UK’s largest broadband retailers. He also notes that YouFibre will remain an independent brand, hence retail competition will not be reduced.

“From where I stand, I don’t really understand where the issue is,” he said. “I’m not wholesale, VMO2 is not wholesale, and Nexfibre is not wholesale – we don’t have Sky, Vodafone, or those larger players. So, we would be increasing wholesale competition. If you look at retail, YouFibre is still there, and with a new wholesale platform, retail ISPs using that platform will become more competitive, resulting in better pricing for people.”

“The main issue is that CityFibre is just not happy, and therefore, they make a lot of noise,” he added.

The CMA’s ‘what if?’

A central consideration for the CMA will be establishing the counterfactual – what would happen had if the merger does not take place?

Chelot argues that Netomnia’s options were increasingly limited.

“Could we build a lot more homes? Where is the capital for that? Would we be a successful wholesaler with Sky and Vodafone? I tried for five years and got nowhere. Would we have merged with another altnet? I’ve been trying for years and was unsuccessful,” he said.

Commenting on these failed deals, Chelot pointed to the inherent complexity of these network deals.

“As soon as you try to [merge with an altnet with] half a million, a million, or more [premises passed], you’re most likely going to have to live with the shareholder on the other side for a very long time. That brings lots of governance issues, valuation challenges, and complicated processes.”

Funding constraints have only made those challenges more acute across the sector, with many altnets being forced to slow or even halt their deployment plans as a result.

“Finding capital to build more homes and generating the right level of return on those homes is currently next to impossible,” he said.

Building a more competitive future

Indeed, Chelot believes approval of the merger is crucial unlock a wave of consolidation that is sorely needed.

“It will signal strongly that consolidation is possible in the UK. Let’s be clear, a lot of the consolidation that’s happened so far has been out of problems or stress, rather than combining two companies that actually think it’s the right path for growth,” he said.

“I think it will spark more consolidation. We’ve seen recently that Community Fibre and Hyperoptic are up for sale. My view is that CityFibre will consolidate more – I think they will get to 8 million homes, maybe more, and to achieve that they’ll need to consolidate 3–6 players,” he added.

Speculating about the future of the UK market at the end of the decade, Chelot said the market will ultimately be dominated by four national fixed-network operators.

“I think we’ll likely have four players with national scale, with at least 8–10 million each or more: Openreach, VMO2, nexfibre, and CityFibre,” he said. “Depending on consolidation, there could even be a fifth player – maybe some kind of rural champion.”

Until this rebalancing of the market, Chelot says the altnet community must not lose focus of their original goal of competing with Openreach.

“People should talk more about the dominance of BT and Openreach. In the past 6–7 year have rolled out fibre to 25 million homes, which is more than everybody else. People sometimes think that, because the altnets occupy so much of the space it is like we won against Openreach. The fight is very much alive,” he said.

“All of the altnets were created out of a desire to challenge Openreach. Anything that gets us closer to that is a good thing,” he concluded.

How is the UK fibre market evolving? Join the industry in discussion at Connected Britain, the UK’s largest digital economy event

Contributed Article

The BoGuan LLM is enabling millions of visitors to enjoy historically accurate experiences from China’s ancient capital

Xi’an, situated in Shaanxi province, is one of the most celebrated cities in all of China. Internationally renowned as the home of the Terracotta Army, the city served as China’s capital for over 1,000 years under 13 different dynasties. Today, it is one of China’s largest domestic tourism destinations, attracting around 330 million visitors annually.

With the rapid rise of AI, the way in which tourists interact with the city is changing. As generative AI becomes increasingly commonplace, tourists are beginning to expect conversational, personalised digital experiences when visiting cultural sites. The problem, however, is that these models do not have access to specialised historical data and so cannot deliver truly unique – and historically accurate – experiences for consumers.

This is why Huawei and Shaanxi Culture Industry Investment Group (SCG) have co-developed BoGuan, the world’s first commercial multimodal large language model (LLM) dedicated to cultural tourism. The partners spent two years compiling a 1.2 Petabyte dataset consisting of 31 million images, 4.4 million minutes of video, and 960 million pieces of structured text to form a specialised foundation for the platform. BoGuan then leverages this data, acting as a unified gateway aggregating 10 open and closed-source models (including Huawei’s PanGu).

“General large models lack specialized knowledge in museology, archaeology and history, making it difficult to meet the nuanced demands of niche scenarios,” noted Edric Chu, General Manager of Huawei’s Shaanxi Rep Office. “We completed 12 high-quality cultural tourism datasets […] using Huawei Cloud Data Engineering to process and label text, images, audio and video […] Supported by three major standards of data collection, management, and circulation, the platform transforms raw data resources into data assets with verifiable ownership.”

New cultural experiences and revenue opportunities

BoGuan underpins a wide range of cultural tourism services across the province, including AI travel assistants, multilingual tour guidance, museum interpretation, AI-generated marketing content, digital preservation of cultural heritage, and short-form video production.

In the B2B sector, BoGuan powers an AI “Video Factory” that fully automates short drama and advertisement production. Meanwhile, for consumers, the model powers ‘Xiaoqi’, an AI travel companion on the GO-SHAANXI app, and the Zhiying Camera mini program, which allows tourists to instantly merge their photos with AI-generated historical settings.

Since its pilot launch in September last year, Huawei says applications powered by BoGuan have reached more than four million users, and it is already delivering a major revenue boost for SCG.

“With the same team size, thanks to these technologies[…] from last year to this June our revenue has increased by roughly 30–40%,” explained Jin Yan, Chairman of the Digital and Intelligent Culture Technology Group at SCG. “The sales of related digital collectibles and creative products have exceeded 2 million Chinese yuan ($300,000).”

SCG has already begun collaborating with tourism authorities in Xinjiang and Guizhou to replicate the BoGuan framework, with the goal of potentially exporting it nationwide in future.

Network infrastructure foundation

Of course, to successfully deploy BoGuan at scale requires powerful network and data infrastructure. Thousands of simultaneous AI interactions require both massive data throughput and dense computing capabilities.

To solve this, SCG’s runs on an on-premise 48P computing platform built with Huawei’s SuperPoD architecture. It uses Huawei’s UnifiedBus technology, an interconnect protocol for SuperPoD that interconnects physical servers so that they can learn, think, and reason like a single logical server.

At the same time, China Telecom Shaanxi and Huawei have blanketed Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall with a 5G Advanced network capable of delivering downlink speeds of 3.5 Gbps and uplink speeds of 600 Mbps. This, the partners explain, is crucial to support the scale of AI use cases being accessed throughout the region.

“The Grand Tang Mall is a textbook example of a high-traffic, high-concurrency, and high-interaction scenario, which poses an immense challenge for any network,” explained Wang Hao, Director of Mobile Communications Network Business at China Telecom Shaanxi. “Within this area […] we have deployed 46 base stations within this compact area, a density that far exceeds standard regions.”

These base stations are also equipped with AI-powered intelligent control boards that can trigger service acceleration protocols when AI photo generation is taking place.

“The embedded AI intelligently and dynamically allocates network resources to match your real-time demands,” Wang said, noting that the network can support 23,000 concurrent users during holiday traffic surges.

Bridging the AI talent gap

Beyond the technology itself, another key them to emerge from discussions about BoGuan – and about creating purpose-built LLMs for other vertical industries – is the lack of workers skilled in both AI usage and their specialist field.

“The industry faces a deficit of millions of interdisciplinary professionals who bridge the gap between cultural tourism and AI,” said Chu. “Shaanxi alone faces a talent gap of 30,000 to 50,000 in culture tourism plus AI, and the national gap is expected to exceed 1 million by 2030.”

As a result, further developing BoGuan and similar LLM projects faces a significant talent bottleneck that can only be overcome through largescale training projects.

“SCG, Huawei, and over 10 institutions have jointly established a talent training base […] aligning vocational certificates with Huawei AI certifications and university micro-majors,” explained Chu. “We expect to train over 1,000 people this year and more than 3,000 next year.”

Proof of vertical AI success

The success of BoGuan is a demonstration of how purpose-built AI models can create new revenue opportunities for telecom operators by combining connectivity, cloud, AI compute and industry expertise into a single commercial platform. Rather than competing solely on network capacity, operators must move to monetise vertical AI through managed services, industry-specific applications, and data products. With its unified AI infrastructure, platform-level scalability, and training on vertical-industry data, the BoGuan LLM helps industries tackle bottlenecks in content production, cost management, capability integration, and data security—ensuring that AI can be practically deployed to fuel sustainable business growth. This same model, in turn, serves as a blueprint for telecom operators seeking to generate lasting growth in the AI era.” Artificial intelligence is not simply a stack of technologies,” concluded Chu. “[In Shaanxi] it has become a key enabler that can activate thousands of years of cultural heritage, reshape travel experiences, and inject new momentum into the industry.”

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Press Release

Sowmyanarayan Sampath appointed CEO to drive the company’s next phase of AI-related and enterprise growth; Steve Smith to remain on Board following retirement

Zayo (“the Company”), the leading digital infrastructure network provider, today announced a planned CEO transition, appointing former Verizon executive Sowmyanarayan Sampath as Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective September 1, 2026. Sampath will succeed Steve Smith, who will retire as CEO following a transformative tenure that established Zayo as the foundational backbone of the AI economy. Smith will continue to serve as a member of Zayo’s Board of Directors.

Under Steve’s leadership, Zayo has evolved from an acquisition-built network operator into the largest independent digital infrastructure network provider and a powerhouse of connectivity serving AI companies and enterprises across the U.S. Sampath’s appointment provides long-term leadership and bolsters Zayo’s market-leading position.

Sampath brings more than two decades of large-scale digital infrastructure experience, most recently serving as CEO of Verizon Consumer, after previously leading Verizon Business and BCG’s global telecom practice for carriers across the world. His extensive background in leading multi-billion-dollar enterprise and wholesale businesses through transformation and rapid technology shifts positions him to accelerate Zayo’s commercial execution, scale for the demands of AI-driven growth, and meet rising demand for high-capacity connectivity.

“On behalf of the Board, I want to thank Steve for his leadership and the important role he has played in strengthening Zayo’s market position,” said Kevin Turner, Chairman of Zayo’s Board of Directors. “Steve has sharpened Zayo’s strategy and positioned the Company for its next phase of growth. This planned transition reflects the strength of our business, the depth of our leadership team, and the Board’s confidence in the path ahead. Sampath’s track record of scaling complex networks and driving enterprise revenue makes him the right leader to maximize the potential from Zayo’s market-leading assets.”

Press Release

The former BT Openreach executive brings more than 25 years of broadband and wholesale telecoms experience

nexfibre, the joint venture between InfraVia Capital Partners, Liberty Global and Telefónica, today announced the appointment of Ses Indy as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), strengthening its senior leadership team as the company executes its mission to build a scaled national wholesale alternative to BT Openreach.

Indy joins nexfibre from BT Openreach and brings more than 25 years of experience across digital infrastructure and fixed telecommunications. Throughout his career, he has held senior commercial leadership roles and worked closely with major communications providers, including Sky, Vodafone and PXC with a particular focus on wholesale strategy and customer growth.

At nexfibre, Indy will lead the company’s commercial strategy, revenue growth and customer engagement activities. His appointment comes at a significant moment for the business as it progresses its planned acquisition of Netomnia, a transaction expected to unlock £3.5 billion of international investment and create a combined network footprint of approximately 8 million premises by the end of 2027.

A three-time recipient of the Sunday Times Best Places to Work award, nexfibre is continuing to scale its wholesale platform and accelerate the rollout of next-generation digital infrastructure across the UK.

Ses Indy, Chief Commercial Officer at nexfibre, said:

“I am delighted to be joining nexfibre at such an exciting and important stage in its growth journey. I look forward to working with the leadership team to drive commercial growth, deepen partner relationships and help deliver the benefits of high-quality full-fibre connectivity to homes and businesses across the country.”

Rajiv Datta, Chief Executive Officer of nexfibre, said:

“The board and I are delighted to welcome Ses to nexfibre. He brings deep industry expertise, a strong track record of commercial leadership and extensive experience of the wholesale broadband market. As we enter our next phase of growth and work towards creating a scaled national wholesale challenger, his leadership will be instrumental in expanding our commercial reach, strengthening customer partnerships and delivering on our long-term ambitions.”

How is the UK connectivity landscape changing in 2026? Join the industry in discussion at Connected Britain 2026

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Multinational cloud telephony provider, LoopUp, and leading Caribbean and Central America communications provider, Digicel, have formed a strategic partnership to sell LoopUp’s Operator Connect telephony platform and service for Microsoft Teams across the Caribbean region.

Service will be offered to the enterprise market, leveraging Digicel’s extensive reach, in-country presence, and trusted business relationships. Customers will be able to integrate their regionwide business telephony with Teams in accordance with Microsoft’s certified deployment model, Operator Connect. Users will be able to make and receive calls from any device running Teams, benefiting from a simple and unified communications experience, and enterprises will be able to make significant cost savings by eliminating all legacy PBX equipment.

“Partnering with Digicel is a significant milestone in LoopUp’s international expansion,” said Steve Flavell Co-CEO of LoopUp. “Not only are we bringing the first Operator Connect capability to the region with Digicel, but we’re also extending our market-leading global country coverage for our multinational enterprise customers, who are headquartered elsewhere in the world but have operations throughout the region.”

For Digicel Business customers, the partnership adds a flagship, next-generation enterprise voice capability to the operator’s growing portfolio of cloud services. Digicel Business serves thousands of organizations across sectors including financial services, hospitality, government, and energy, many of whom have standardized on Microsoft Teams, and are now looking to bring their telephony under that Teams-first, unified communications umbrella.

“Our customers are asking for smarter, simpler ways to communicate,” said Liam Donnelly, Chief Business Officer for Digicel Group, “and Microsoft Teams has become the platform of choice for many of them. By partnering with LoopUp, we can give our enterprise customers a seamless, fully managed Teams telephony experience, regionwide and now globally, leveraging the simpler and more cost-effective Microsoft-certified Operator Connect approach and backed by the local support and network reach only Digicel can provide.”

The service will be available to Digicel Business customers from July 2026.

About LoopUp

LoopUp helps multinational enterprises consolidate how they buy and manage their global Microsoft Teams telephony, offering phone numbers and full cloud-based, PSTN-replacement service in more than 100 countries around the world. We liberate multinationals from the frustrations, complexities and inefficiencies of working with multiple regional carriers, each with their own contracts, pricing, support teams and management portals. LoopUp offers a single and consistent global solution, combining design, deployment, service delivery and support – provided globally and all integrated with Microsoft Teams and bringing calling data into the enterprise AI dataset. LoopUp is headquartered in London with operations around the world.

About Digicel

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News

The fibre and fixed wireless access (FWA) specialist has struggled to attract customers to use its network at scale

Following a strategic review, alternative network provider Airband has begun a formal sale process.

Related documents were sent to prospective buyers this week, with the company seeking “the right long-term owner”.

It could also face debt restructuring, according to two anonymous sources speaking to the Financial Times.

“Following a strategic review of the business and its future ownership, Airband has commenced a formal sale process to identify the right long-term owner for the company,” a spokesperson told ISPreview. “Airband continues to operate and trade as normal throughout the process. Our network remains fully operational and there is no impact on customer services or day-to-day operations.”

Airband’s full fibre network currently covers around 175,000 premises and a further 265,000 are covered by FWA. Of this total footprint of around 440,000 premises, only around 30,000 premises are customers – far below the level the company would need to recoup the costs of its expensive network deployment in the short term.

Airband has been struggling to improve its position for years, with its first round of restructuring and job cuts taking place in 2024. More changes and redundancies were announced earlier this year, with the company claiming it was shifting its focus to “transitioning towards operational maturity, with a focus on long-term sustainability, enhanced customer experience and efficient delivery.”

Airband’s operating loss this year increased to £47.23 million, with total liabilities of over £224 million. Total assets were reported at £179.81 million.

Exactly who might purchase Airband remains unclear. The UK’s largest altnet, CityFibre, has long had ambitions of being the UK’s key fibre network consolidator, notably earmarking around £800 million of its £2.3 billion in fresh funding last year for M&A. However, the company has been facing its own financial challenges of late, largely related to its £3.7 billion in debt that was restructured in January.

Virgin Media O2 and its sister company nexfibre would be the next obvious choice, but these parties already have their hands full with the £2 billion acquisition of Netomnia.

At a time when altnets across the country are looking to make deals, finding a suitable partner could be a lengthy process.

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