Here is a series of news bytes covering regional infrastructure expansion projects from this week: … [visit site to read more]

Interesting news items from Europe, southeast Asia, and the Middle East from the past several days: … [visit site to read more]

Podcasts

Ben Elkins, the CEO of AireBeam and Utah Broadband, joined the ‘Beyond the Cable’ podcast to discuss strategy and AireBeam’s explosive growth in Arizona

By: Brad Randall, Broadband Communities

Since taking the helm as the CEO of an Arizona City-based AireBeam, Ben Elkins has overseen a 375 percent growth in fiber subscribers for the ISP.

Now, Elkins is attempting to repeat success at another subsidiary of the Boston Omaha Corporation: Utah Broadband.

Named as the Utah Broadband’s CEO in May, Elkins now wears both hats, one as the CEO of AireBeam, another as the CEO of Utah Broadband. He reflected on some of AireBeam’s growth, and how he was able to achieve such stunning success in Arizona’s Pinal County.

“It’s very rural, but it’s growing,” Elkins said of Pinal County. “It’s the fastest growing county in the state of Arizona.”

Wedged between Phoenix and Tuscon, Elkins said it came to his attention after research that many of the county’s mobile home parks were severely underserved.

“So, I went out and got nationwide deals with a lot of the mobile home park developers,” he said. “And provided fiber to the parks that really fit or demographics and fit our profile.”

Elkins said he was able to lock in 20-year agreements with some developers.

According to Elkins, many mobile home parks are ignored by larger service providers because residents are often temporary.

“It’s been a huge hit for us,” he said, adding that AireBeam also “fibered up” the entire community of Arizona City and Florence.

While Elkins said the explosive-type growth that AireBeam saw was likely unique due to demographics in the area, he also predicts growth ahead for Utah Broadband.

Listen to Elkins on Spotify

Click here to listen to the full interview with Elkins on Spotify, and why he believes Utah still contains “huge opportunity” for Utah Broadband.

Listen to Elkins on Apple Podcasts

To hear the episode featuring Elkins on Apple Podcasts, click here.

Learn more about Broadband Communities Summit 2025 in Houston.

Also, click here to subscribe to the Broadband Communities newsletter. 

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There has been some consolidation activity in the fiber last mile this week. Gateway Fiber and WANRack have announced plans to merge into a national FTTX platform touching 25 states. … [visit site to read more]

News 

BT is expected to cut the diversity targets from its managerial bonus scheme, according to a recent article from The Telegraph 

The company has told its major investors that it will replace the DEI section of its managerial bonus scorecard with a “measure of employee engagement,” which will come into effect in April. 

Currently, ten percent of the BT annual bonus for its 37,400 managers is made up of DEI targets, comprised of representation of women, disabled people and ethnic minorities, as well as employee engagement of underrepresented groups. 

“We remain committed to our inclusion and representation targets and are making good progress towards them. Inclusion will remain part of our senior management bonus calculations and we have received strong support from our shareholders on the proposals to amend our group scorecard,” said a BT spokesperson. 

Just last week, Kirkby told employees in a company memo “It’s been hard lately to see companies and governments stepping back from their commitment to inclusion, equity and diversity. For many of you watching this unfold, I imagine it feels worrying and upsetting.  

“It sends the message that these things are optional, temporary or not worth prioritising. I want to be absolutely clear: that’s not what we believe at BT.” 

The news comes as President Trump signed an Executive Order the day after his inauguration, terminating DEI initiatives in federal contracting. Similar initiatives have been rolled other large corporations, including Meta and Amazon in the tech sector and Walmart, McDonald’s, Ford Motors, and Target in other sectors.  

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Also in the news:
Nokia and AT&T extend voice core partnership
UK PM urges for more European cooperation as suspicious subsea activity increases
From the bully pulpit: FCC’s Carr could pursuade allies over new subsea cable regulation

Keep up-to-date with all the latest news, articles, event and product updates posted on Developing Telecoms.
Subscribe to our FREE weekly email newsletters for the latest telecom info in developing and emerging markets globally.

A new data center, a new subsea cable, a new branch, and some FTTH: … [visit site to read more]

News 

The heavy reliance on undersea cables remains a major risk as over 95% of global internet traffic depends on them 

UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has urged European leaders for increased cooperation on subsea infrastructure defences at a European Council meeting in Brussels.

The call comes after an increase in suspicious activity from Chinese and Russian vessels around key European submarine cables. Last month, A Russian spy ship was caught in the English Channel attempting to gather information on critical underwater infrastructure. 

Furthermore, there has been multiple submarine cable incidents in the Baltic Sea since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with many of these cable cuts – intentional or otherwise – being linked to Russian and Chinese vessels. As the frequency of these incidents has ramped up, NATO has deployed patrol ships to the region as part of a mission called ‘Baltic Sentry’. 

“We need to deepen co-operation to protect ourselves from state threats and sabotage, including on sub-sea infrastructure,” said Sir Kier in an address to European leaders. 

In disclosed correspondence between House of Lords Peers Lord Coaker and Lord West of Spithead, it has been revealed that the UK’s first multi-role ocean surveillance ship, RFA Proteus, has been deployed as part of a broader plan to protect national infrastructure, with a second vessel still in the early planning stages. 

The government is “committed to ensuring the security and resilience of the UK’s telecommunications infrastructure” and pointed to ongoing coordination with government agencies and the subsea cable industry, said Lord Coaker. 

Just last week, The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) announced that it would explore the security credentials of the UK’s submarine cable ecosystem as part of a new industry enquiry, in a direct response to the increase in suspected malicious underwater activity. 

The government emphasised the UK’s reliance on its 60 existing submarine cables, warning of the potential disruption that damage to multiple cables at once would cause the UK. 

Join the conversation at the EMEA’s Most Important Subsea Event, Submarine Networks EMEA! Get tickets here. 

Also in the news:
From the bully pulpit: FCC’s Carr could pursuade allies over new subsea cable regulation
Labour to slash rural broadband funding
EE renews partnership with Home Nations Football Associations and Wembley Stadium

Taking a leap forward from 4.7, 4.8 focuses on one of the more major changes in the industry today, the addition of IPv6, both to help combat the scarcity of remaining IPv4 addresses and their rising financial upkeep costs.

Additionally, Further QoL changes have been made to SERVERware to streamline DNS record management as well as the overall experience with using the SERVERware GUI.

Let’s find out about it in a bit more detail, shall we?

SERVERware

Adding IPv6 Address Support

While IPv4 addresses still retain relevance, their growing scarcity has started to impose issues for address translation for SIP traffic as well as monetary issues in regards to their procurement.

That’s why we have enabled support for IPv6 addressing in both SERVERware and sipPROT.

This support relays across most of SERVERware’s core systems like: networking, addressing, geo-redundancy and DNS resolution.

Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are still supported thanks to SERVERware’s dual stack network configuration support with the note that the IPv6 feature is still in the testing phase and may receive changes down the line.

Networking has added a new tab for adding IPv6 subnets where both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses will be available when reserving address space for Partition resources and configuring VPS network interfaces.

As far as Addressing is concerned, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can be assigned.

However, currently only static IPv6 addresses can be assigned, but look forward to dynamic IPv6 addressing in the future.

With Geo-Redundancy, both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address can be used as a failover option under Geo-Redundancy settings.

And for DNS Resolution, SERVERware’s CoreDNS service responsible for handling DNS queries now supports resolving AAAA records for IPv6 addresses.

French Language Localization

In an effort to support localization of our products and make them easier to use for users who aren’t native English speakers, a French translation for SERVERware will be available with v4.8.

Almost every aspect will be fully translated, including backend messages.

The only parts of SERVERware that will remain in English are system logs in order to ensure quick response times from our Support and Dev teams for troubleshooting purposes.

We aim to localize SERVERware across more languages in the future. Should you have any particular requests on which languages you’d want us to add next, feel free to reach out to us.

Official and Community Template Verification And Signatures

The inclusion of the SERVERware template restructure was well received, however we always aim to provide you with the best experience which is why we’ve continued to improve upon it as v4.8 introduces template verification and online signatures for templates stored on the Bicom repository.

This serves to add an extra layer of protection to your systems as unsigned templates will now trigger a warning to notify you that you’re about to install an unsigned template at your discretion, allowing you to either proceed with the install or cancel it if you were prompted to install a fake or unsafe version by mistake.

CNAME DNS Records For VPSs

The next major update coming with 4.8 is CNAME record resolution and assignment support for VPSs that are running on SERVERware which should help simplify DNS A record management for domains.

This change has made it possible to create multiple CNAME records for a single VPS with different DNS names that’ll still be resolved to the same IP address by the SERVERware Controller.

In order to facilitate this change, we’ve redesigned the existing DNS SRV tab to provide a more intuitive layout that should simplify the addition of DNS records to a designated VPS, with the option to edit existing records.

Secondary DNS Zone Persistence

In order to provide further redundancy options for any unforeseen downtime, 4.8 is adding secondary DNS zone persistence for SERVERware sites that depend on the Controller’s ability to respond to DNS queries.

It ensures that the DNS zone information remains reachable even if the primary DNS zone goes down for any reason as all the information on it is stored on the site that’s designated and configured to act as the secondary DNS zone.

It should respond to DNS queries in place of the primary zone should the latter go down.

API Documentation

To provide a way for seasoned developers to recall all of SERVERware’s functionalities in regards to VPS management as well as make it easier to onboard new ones, we’ve introduced API documentation to SERVERware.

It can be found under the “Account Settings” tab and it provides detailed information about managing VPSs with example outputs and the possibility to test each API call directly from the UI.

sipPROT

sipPROT and IPv6

As mentioned earlier, sipPROT has also seen an update with SERVERware’s IPv6 address support, allowing sipPROT to further enhance its security capabilities by adding IPv6 address ranges into its attack detection radius.

This also applies to its dynamic blocking, allowing it to automatically detect and block potential malicious actors trying to stage an attack on your systems from an IPv6 address.

API Documentation

Similar to SERVERware, sipPROT is also getting its own API documentation section, detailing all actions revolving around IP address list management as well as including calls for fetching data from Attack Logs and Hosts tabs, making it useful for devs both new and seasoned.

The standalone version of sipPROT will receive its own API documentation section in the next sipPROT release.

And More…

Alongside these major changes, we’ve also been hard at work ironing out any kinks and squashing bugs that were present prior, ensuring a smoother experience with both SERVERware and sipPROT alike.

For more detailed information regarding all the changes, you can check out the full v4.8 release notes here.

We are sure to continue our efforts in developing a platform that satisfies the needs of your clients while retaining its intuitive design throughout and we are looking forward to showing you more of what we have in store, but more on that in our future releases.

Until then, we hope to have met your expectations and that both you and your clients remain satisfied.