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Internet giant Google has today announced that their new private subsea fibre optic cable – ‘Grace Hopper‘, which will run between the USA (New York), UK (Bude, Cornwall) and Spain (Bilbao), has landed in South West England. The new cable has enough capacity to carry data at speeds of c.340Tbps (Terabits per second).
Ookla, which runs Speedtest.net, has today revealed more data about 5G mobile speeds and availability across the UK. Overall, the country delivered average (median) 5G download speeds of 167.38Mbps (15.91Mbps upload), but availability is still low at 10.2% (17.9% on EE, 10.3% on Vodafone, 6.4% on Three UK and 5.4% on O2).
Mobile operator EE (BT) has today announced that they will begin rolling out the new 700MHz band for use on their ultrafast 5G based mobile (mobile broadband) network from October 2021. Redditch, Morecambe and Cramlington will be amongst the first UK towns to benefit from the extra spectrum.
Alternative network ISP Freedom Fibre (FF), which started rolling out a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across semi-rural parts of North West England in March 2021, has today accelerated its growth forecast after securing a second major equity injection.
Alternative UK ISP Swish Fibre, which is deploying its own Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, has accused BT of trying to censor (via a complaint to the advertising watchdog) its own tongue-in-cheek campaign that attempted to highlight the “misleading practice of promoting speed-sapping copper-mix services as ‘Fibre broadband’.”
SpaceX has this morning launched another batch of 51 new Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which unlike prior launches are the first to adopt the new v1.5 platform design that includes inter satellite laser links to help boost performance, coverage and reliability.
The annual 2021 global speeds report from research firm M-Lab and Cable.co.uk has reported that the United Kingdom delivered an average (mean) broadband ISP download speed of 51.48Mbps (up from 37.82Mbps last year), ranking us 43rd fastest in the world (up from 47th last year, but still down from 34th in 2019).
Vodafone UK and WPI Economics have called on the government to help fix the climate by putting the rollout of 5G (mobile broadband), IoT and other digital connectivity at the core of its forthcoming Net Zero strategy – it’s claimed this could reduce the UK’s overall emissions by up to 4% a year (17.4 million tonnes of CO2e).