Fibre optic UK ISP Grain Connect, which is backed by £10m from Albion Capital, has been spotted deploying their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to existing homes in the resort town of Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast, as well as Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness and Blackburn.

Sky’s sibling UK ISP and TV streaming service, NOW (NOW Broadband), has today discounted the price of their Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) based “Super Fibre” (63Mbps) package, which comes with inclusive anytime UK phone calls, to just £22 per month for the length of its 12-month minimum contract term.

Ofcom has published their annual Online Nation 2021 report, which examines how we all use and interact with the internet in the United Kingdom. Overall, it found that 86% of adults use the internet (94% for households – up from 84% last year) and we spent an average of 3 hours and 37 mins online each day (up from 3:28 HH:MM).

Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) has recently been spotted running a couple of interesting trials, one of which appeared to give a limited number of people access to take a completely “free” 10Mbps broadband service, while the other doubled the upload speeds for selected customers on their 100Mbps tier.

Mobile operator Vodafone has today announced that they’ve switched on two new rural 4G Open Radio Access Network (OpenRAN) sites in Cornwall – Fistral Beach in Newquay and the community of St Keverne on The Lizard. The two locations are only the second and third such sites to go live on their UK network.

Lebara has today signed a new 3.5-year extension agreement with partner Vodafone UK, which will finally enable the Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) to launch ultrafast 5G services for their customers. Until now they’ve only had access to Vodafone’s slower 4G and older platforms.

Customers of various UK broadband ISPs and mobile operators are today reporting that they’re unable to access major online newspapers, government and other websites, with many facing the “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message. Fingers are currently being pointed at Amazon’s cloud services and another cloud provider, Fastly.

Neos Networks, which until recently operated a 20,000km+ long fibre network via over 350 related Points of Presence (PoPs) across the UK, has today announced that they’ve unbundled a further 201 exchanges on their network and aim to have 550 exchanges on-net by the end of the year.

A team of Toshiba’s scientists working at their Cambridge Research Laboratory in the UK have managed to extend the distance at which their quantum cryptography solution works in a fibre optic cable – Twin-Field Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) – from around a range of 100-200km to 600km.

A new report from the Independent Networks Co-operative Association and Point Topic has estimated that alternative “full fibre” (FTTP/B) broadband ISPs grew their UK coverage by 110% in 2020 (up from 52% last year) and cover 2.586 million premises – such providers now aspire to cover 29.9m by the end of 2025.

Crowdsourced benchmarking firm Tutela has published their latest H1 2021 study of mobile broadband (4G and 3G) performance across the United Kingdom, which broadly finds that EE (BT) delivered the best download speeds and fastest latency times, although Vodafone came top for uploads.

CityFibre has today announced the start of their “city-wide” £25m investment to deploy a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the Somerset city of Bath, but they’ll be entering into an increasingly competitive market with several other gigabit-capable rivals.

UK ISP BT Business has today announced the forthcoming 1st July 2021 launch of a new unit that will be tasked with catering for the SoHo market (i.e. micro home-based and single site businesses), which comes attached to an array of new “business-grade” broadband plans (FTTC, FTTP), “unbreakable Wi-Fi” and other services.

Orbital Net (Vfast), which operates its own Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network in various parts of England, has finally started to deploy their own gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in rural parts of Kent and Sussex. The work is being supported by a multi-million pound investment from Mobeus.

The UK Government’s new rural-focused Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme is said to have faced “significant challenges” due to issues with the stability of its website, which DCMS told ISPs had resulted in temporary site outages and “issues with automated supplier payments and reporting.” But only “some users” were affected.

Opensignal, which uses crowd-sourced data to benchmark mobile broadband networks across the world, has published an updated comparison of 5G performance across Europe and the Middle East (EMEA). The UK scored an average download of 121.4Mbps (13.8Mbps upload), which is roughly half what the top performers deliver.

Openreach and BT (BTWholesale) have posted a useful and highly informative new video that cuts out the usual cosmetics in order to offer watchers an engineer’s eye-view style tour of how their new gigabit-capable UK Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network is delivered – all the way from the exchange to the home.