CityFibre UK has today announced that they’ve started the construction phase of their £30m project to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in the Greater Manchester town of Rochdale (England), which is being supported by civil engineering firm Network PLUS.

The overall project, which is expected to reach “almost every home and business” in the town, aims to reach completion by 2024, but the first services will go live – in gradual phases – for people to take advantage of much sooner. Once areas do go live then the first ISPs to pledge support for the new network in Rochdale will include Vodafone (Gigafast Broadband), TalkTalk (Future Fibre) and Zen Internet (Zen is based in the town).

Once again, the new build forms part of CityFibre’s wider £4.9bn investment…

Read the full story here.

In a surprise development, new and existing customers who sign-up to one of Sky Broadband’s superfast, ultrafast or gigafast (FTTC, G.Fast or FTTP) powered internet access packages are now being given a “Wall to Wall WiFi guarantee” at no extra cost. Sky’s Wi-Fi Guarantee is normally only available as part of their paid ‘Boost’ add-on.

At the time of writing, Sky has not issued us with any press releases about this change, but several of our readers did spot the recent addition to their package. Normally the only way to get a Wi-Fi guarantee from Sky Broadband would be to add their Sky Broadband Boost add-on for an extra £5 per month (this also adds line checks, engineer visits and “WiFi boosters at no extra cost, if your home needs them“).

Read the full story here.

Mobile operator EE (BT) has this afternoon been hit by a sporadic network outage, which started at around 1pm and primarily seems to be affecting mobile broadband connectivity via 4G and 5G services (3G still works.. sometimes), across different parts of the United Kingdom.

In a brief statement, which was posted to both their website and social media channels, EE said: “Some customers are experiencing problems when trying to use network services this afternoon. We are aware of this and are working to resolve this as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

Experiences seem to vary, with some customers reporting that the issue only affects their data connectivity, while others have been saying that they’ve got no signal at all. The issue also seems to prevent Wi-Fi Calling from working while on a home broadband network, but others have been able to get this to work.

UPDATE 23rd June 2022 @ 8:53am

An EE spokesperson said: “Mobile services were restored overnight and customers who were affected are now able to make calls and use data on our network. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience caused during this time.“

New broadband and mobile customers of UK ISP BT will, from the end of this month, no longer be able to benefit from the operator’s included Email and online Cloud storage features. The good news is that existing customers will be unaffected, at least for now.

The change flows from BT’s announcement in April (here), which revealed that, over time, they intend to turn EE into the “flagship brand for our consumer customers” (i.e. converged broadband and mobile plans). As part of that, the operator has been busy reviewing what this means for their products and services.

Admittedly, we’re surprised that BT’s Email platform has lasted this long, since these days very few broadband ISPs either advertise or even include it alongside their packages – partly because Freemail services (Hotmail, Gmail etc.) have reduced their importance, and they’re often seen as more trouble than they’re worth to maintain. Similarly, there’s a fair bit of choice to be found when it comes to Cloud storage (Mega, MediaFire, Dropbox etc.), although not all of them provide a free option.

Read the full story here.

Ofcom has today introduced new rules to protect public UK phone boxes (payphones) – specifically those built by BT and KCOM – when they exist in areas with “poor mobile signals or high accident rates“. In addition, payphones will now require battery backup so that they can keep working after going digital (all-IP).

At present, there are currently around 20,000 UK payphone boxes still in operation, which is down sharply from the 92,000 that BT alone once had at its peak. Similarly, there has been a steep decline in calls made from such boxes, falling from 800 million minutes in 2002 to just 4 million in 2021/22.

NOTE: Phone boxes were used to make almost 150,000 calls to emergency services in the year to May 2020, while 25,000 calls were made to Childline and 20,000 to the Samaritans.

However, BT has spent the past few years decommissioning many of their payphones, most of which were no longer being used, which is largely due to improvements in mobile phone coverage and related service affordability. Some of those have been replaced by BT’s new smart WiFi Street Hub kiosks (mostly in busy urban areas), while around 6,000 others have been adopted by local authorities for other purposes (e.g. turning them into WiFi hotspots or storage for life-saving public defibrillators etc.).

Read the full story here.

Broadband ISP Wessex Internet has boosted their existing rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in South England by securing a new contract to connect 35 public sites (schools, libraries etc.) under the ‘Gigahub Connectivity in Rural Dorset Project‘, which is supported by £900k from Dorset Council.

Among the 35 sites included in this project are 22 primary and secondary schools – from the Purbecks in the south to Gillingham in the north. Durlston Country Park is also set to be connected, and the funding will also help two libraries, a care home and a children’s centre.

The first sites are due to be connected to the new full fibre network in June 2022 and all sites will then be completed by September 2023.

Read the full story here.