CityFibre and their civil engineering partner Telent have today broken ground on a new £60m project in the Lancashire seaside town of Blackpool, which aims to deploy a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network to cover nearly all local homes and businesses.

Residents on a relatively new build homes development in the rural Shropshire (England) market town of Shifnal have been left confused after Openreach, which had been deploying a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the area, suddenly abandoned the build due to a “system error” and cost issues.

Earlier this year we reported on an increasingly common example of how network capacity problems on Openreach’s UK telegraph poles can prevent people from ordering a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband service via their ISP (here). Today we share a little more detail on the operator’s plan for tackling this.

Openreach (BT) has confirmed a small but important change to their wholesale Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband product, which reduces the product’s minimum contract term from 12 months to just 1. But whether or not UK ISPs choose to pass this on to consumers is another matter entirely.

City-focused internet provider Hyperoptic, which is currently deploying 1Gbps capable “full fibre” (FTTP/B) broadband networks across large residential buildings (MDUs), office blocks and houses, has adopted InvisiLight technology from OFS to help cut the time and cost of retrofitting fibre into existing sites.

A new agreement signed by Liberty Global will see broadband ISP Virgin Media UK expanding the use of Teleste‘s Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) technology in their network, which should help to get the best performance out of their platform and support the rollout of gigabit speeds to homes.

Street Works UK, a Trade Association that represents utilities and their contractors on street works issues, has warned that mission creep in the Government’s new Lane Rental scheme is threatening to significantly increase the cost of deploying new broadband networks across England and Wales.

Mobile operator Vodafone and supply partner Ericsson have begun a new trial that uses aerial drones and Lidar-based 3D technology to speed up network planning and site upgrades for new 4G and 5G mobile (mobile broadband) networks, such as by using them to conduct surveys of difficult to reach rural and city centre sites.

CityFibre has announced that their £40m roll-out of a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the Buckinghamshire town of Milton Keynes, which was substantially completed at the end of last year (i.e. they still had a bit left to do), is to be expanded to reach an additional 7,000 homes.

Residents of the Parklands Development in Reading (Berkshire), which was built a few years ago by CALA and had a battle just to get FTTC from Openreach (BT) installed, are celebrating after managing to convince Hyperoptic to deploy their “full fibre” (FTTP/B) broadband network to all 300+ homes on the site.

The Building Digital UK programme is reportedly preparing to approve a small funding boost for the Project Stratum deployment in Northern Ireland, which will see the chosen supplier (Fibrus) build their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to a couple of thousand extra premises.

Senior Government MPs and Ofcom have backed a call by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) for the development of future 6G based mobile broadband technologies to prioritise societal benefits, instead of the usual focus on delivering “ever higher data [speeds] and ever higher spectrum bands.”

Broadband ISP Wildanet has announced the official start of their £50m programme to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across Cornwall in England, which will start with the provider’s home town of Liskeard before moving into the surrounding rural areas within the PL14 postcode.

Openreach (BT) has signed a strategic collaboration with network integrator firm STL, which will see the company provide optical cable solutions to help support the UK operator’s ongoing deployment of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP networks to 20 million UK premises by 2025-30.

UK ISP BorderLink, which covers parts of Southern Scotland and Northern England with their ultrafast wireless broadband (100Mbps+) network, has secured a major £10.5m funding boost from the Gresham House Investment Fund (BSIF) to help them deploy 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) services.

The latest April 2021 Mobile Network Experience Report from Opensignal has measured the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) performance of all four primary operators – EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK – to determine which delivers the best connectivity. Overall EE leads the pack, but it’s not a clear-cut victory in every category.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority has today “provisionally” cleared the proposed £31bn (total enterprise value) mega merger between broadband provider Virgin Media (Liberty Global) and mobile operator O2 (Telefonica), which will light the fuse on a major £10bn project to extend “full fibre” FTTP and 5G mobile services.