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Broadband and mobile providers EE (BT) and Virgin Media UK have today posted some interesting snapshots to help illustrate how the current spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is impacting the way their customers make use of internet connectivity, which among other things show a big surge during the Prime Minister’s daily briefings.
West Midlands 5G, which is one of the groups responsible for helping to deliver the UK’s first government-backed 5G testbed, has awarded a major contract to a consortium led by O2. Under this deal the mobile operator will build 5G accelerators that could benefit up to 2,000 businesses in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry.
Mobile operator Vodafone UK has announced that they’re giving 500,000 of their Pay Monthly customers, plus NHS staff, 30-days free access to unlimited mobile data (mobile broadband). On top of that those flagged as being “vulnerable” can expected to be “proactively” upgraded to benefit.
Openreach’s decision to significantly limit their engineering work this week (here) has naturally caused somewhat of a cascade effect among UK ISPs. As a result providers, such as BT and Sky Broadband, have paused new orders for ultrafast broadband services and limited other activity.
Cityfibre have this morning confirmed that they’ve completed their £200m purchase of FibreNation from UK ISP TalkTalk, which increases the operator’s roll-out ambition for 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband technology from 5 million to nearly 8 million premises, supported by an investment project of up to £4bn.
Poole-based ISP Juice Broadband, which offers a mix of “full fibre” (FTTP) and wireless internet access services to homes and businesses around southern Dorset, has responded to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) situation by giving all of their existing residential customers “unlimited” free UK landline and mobile calls.
Vodafone UK will today join some of the other major ISPs (e.g. BT) by increasing the minimum contract term of their “superfast” FTTC broadband and phone packages from 18 to 24 months. At the same time they’ll also discount the Superfast 1 (35Mbps) package to be priced the same as Superfast 2 (63Mbps) from £20.95 a month.