Rural ISP TrueSpeed, which is backed by an investment of £75m from Aviva Investors and is deploying a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across South West England (mostly Somerset), has today appointed Paul Burridge as their new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to help accelerate their plans and future growth.

After a long wait Sky Broadband has finally become the latest UK ISP to introduce an ultrafast and superfast broadband package based off Openreach’s Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, but sadly this will initially take the form of a small scale pilot and is currently only available to a number of FTTP eligible homes.

After a four year campaign for better internet connectivity two villages in rural Somerset (England) – Wanstrow and Batcombe – will soon be able to receive a 30-50Mbps capable “superfast broadband” speed, which is all thanks to a new Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network from UK ISP Voneus.

Mobile operator and ISP Vodafone UK has launched a new promotion to help small businesses get through the COVID-19 crisis, which essentially offers them free broadband with unlimited usage and free access to Microsoft 365 Business Standard’s full suite of flexible business tools for a whole 6 months.

Poole-based UK ISP Juice Broadband, which offers a mix of “full fibre” (FTTP) and fixed wireless internet access services to local premises around southern Dorset (England), has teamed-up with local firm Datacenta to agree a new network peering arrangement that will help to keep data traffic between their customers within the county.

Openreach (BT) has announced the expected addition of several new speeds tiers, including the more consumer orientated 550Mbps (75Mbps upload) and 1Gbps (115Mbps upload) options, to their business focused FTTP on Demand (FTTPoD / FoD) UK broadband ISP product. On top of that they’ve also tweaked some of its prices.

Cityfibre has announced that civil engineering firm Lite Access Technologies has been signed to help complete their £20m roll-out of a new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network to 60,000 premises in the UK city of Cambridge (Cambridgeshire), which is due to complete by the end of 2021.

The incumbent broadband ISP and mobile network operator for the English Channel Island of Guernsey, Sure, has today chosen UK technology and network services company telent to help upgrade their existing 10G (10Gbps) network with a 100G Juniper Networks core.

Urban focused UK full fibre network builder Cityfibre has managed to snatch away one of Ofcom’s top legal professionals in the shape of Polly Weitzman, the regulator’s current General Counsel with extensive experience in the field of telecoms regulation and law.

The Superfast Broadband North Yorkshire (SFNY) project, which has been working with Openreach (BT) to extend “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) via FTTC and FTTP to reach 94% of premises in the county by June 2021 (currently 91%), has begun the process to find a supplier for their £12.5m Phase 4 roll-out contract.

Business and residential ISP Glide Group (formerly CableCom), which has an ambition to cover 200,000 premises by the end of 2020 (mostly via fibre optic broadband solutions), is reportedly gearing up to announce their sale to American infrastructure investment firm Alinda Capital Partners (ACP) for around £200m.

Broadband and UK mobile giant BT Group has today launched two new UK initiatives, the ‘Green Tech Innovation Platform’ and the ‘UK Electric Fleets Alliance’, which they say will help to form the foundation for a climate friendly recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and help to drive the country’s “Net Zero carbon emissions.”

The Welsh Government (WG) has issued their first quarterly progress update on the £22.5m Phase 2 contract they have with Openreach (BT), which aims to extend gigabit-capable “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband to a further 26,000 premises by March 2021 (here and here). So far 8,283 rural premises have been completed.

Broadband and mobile giant BT (EE) has announced that they will re-open their high street retail stores from the 15th June 2020 as part of a phased roll-out alongside new social distancing measures, which is in stark contrast to rival Virgin Media’s recent decision (here) to completely abandon their high-street presence.

The Dumfries and Galloway Council (DGC) in Scotland has secured a public investment of £1.36M under the UK Government’s £200m Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme, which will be used to help 35 rural primary schools in the region to access a new “gigabit-capable” broadband or Ethernet connection.

Mobile operator EE (BT) has started to extend their new 5G ultrafast mobile broadband network to cover an additional 9 towns and cities across the United Kingdom, including locations such as Southend-on-Sea, Stirling and Weybridge.

Northern Ireland firm Obelisk Networks UK (formerly Obelisk Communications), which is part of a civil engineering group that normally builds infrastructure for others, appears to be considering a plan that would see it build a new FTTP broadband network and then offer direct retail products or wholesale out to ISPs.