EE is to upgrade 4G coverage in more than 200 rural locations across Wales by June 2024, as part of the Shared Rural Network (SRN) programme agreed last year.

The Shared Rural Network – an agreement between the UK’s four mobile network operators and UK Government – is aiming to extend 4G coverage to 95% of the UK’s geography by 2025.

The upgrades announced today are part of the first phase of the SRN programme, where EE will invest to significantly reduce ‘partial not-spots’ in mobile coverage.

EE has already upgraded its 4G network in 97 rural locations across Wales since the SRN deal was signed in March 2020. Today, EE has pledged to extend 4G in a further 123 locations in Wales, bringing the total to 220 in this phase of the programme. All sites have been made available for other operators to share under the SRN scheme.

Read the full story here.

News summary:

• UK-based service provider is expanding ultra-fast broadband to more homes and businesses
• Compact and scalable ADVA FSP 3000 technology delivers new levels of reliability
• ADVA’s professional service team is providing end-to-end project management, maintenance and support

ADVA (FSE: ADV) today announced that KCOM is harnessing its FSP 3000 open optical transport technology to meet soaring data demand. The new infrastructure enables the UK-based communication and IT service provider to deliver highly reliable, ultra-fast connectivity to more residential and business customers across the Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire regions. Featuring ADVA’s QuadFlex™ line card, OpenFabric™ cross-connect and colorless, directionless, flexgrid ROADM technology, the solution empowers KCOM to remotely turn up new services with complete flexibility and control. After managing all stages of design, implementation, optimization and testing, ADVA’s specialist team will provide ongoing maintenance and support.

Read the full press release on ADVA’s website.

Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) announced today that G8 Telecommunications (G8) deployed Infinera’s industry-leading GX Series Compact Modular Platform on its long-haul DWDM network to increase network capacity to meet the growing needs of enterprises, network operators, and government companies across Brazil. Infinera’s solutions enable G8 to double capacity on its network and offer its customers a variety of high-capacity internet services. 

G8 operates long-haul and regional networks in Brazil with presence in states with growing bandwidth demands like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Goiás, Minas Gerais, and Bahia. As bandwidth demands increase exponentially driven by cloud applications, G8 has made massive investments in its infrastructure and optical backbone, with more than 3,000 km throughout the country with an aim to interconnect the major markets nationwide to support its wide range of customers. 

Leveraging Infinera’s GX G30 platform on its long-haul network, G8 benefits from a highly scalable 1.2 terabit transponder with individual channels up to 600 Gb/s per lambda and the ability to scale to 2.4 terabits in a single rack unit. The compact modular solution with simplified operations enables the company to rapidly modernize its network infrastructure to quickly deliver high optical performance on demand. 

“Infinera’s GX solutions provide us with robust solutions that deliver the high capacity we’re looking for on long-distance spans with ease and reliability and seamless operations in existing optical line systems,” said Rogério Fernandes, CTO at G8 Telecommunications. “Deploying Infinera’s solutions on our network doubles the capacity we’re able to offer today across all distances, setting us up for success against our competitors.” 

“We are pleased to work closely with G8 and our partner Arsitec to modernize G8’s networks to provide its customers with reliable, high-capacity services to meet the growing bandwidth needs in the region,” said Alexandre Salomão, Infinera Country Manager for Brazil. “By deploying Infinera’s innovative solutions, G8 is well-positioned to deliver fast service activation to its customers and remain competitive in the market.”

Read the full press release on Infinera’s website.

Shares jump as telecoms giant decides against pursuing joint venture to fund Openreach division.

BT has ditched plans to bring in an outside investor to boost its ultrafast broadband upgrade, as profits slipped ahead of a potential takeover bid by the French billionaire Patrick Drahi.

The chief executive, Philip Jansen, said he held talks with potential investors, but opted not to create a joint venture with its infrastructure builder Openreach to help bring the fastest connections to an extra 5m homes.

He said the decision was driven by the falling cost of upgrading its ageing copper network to faster full-fibre alongside a better-than-expected take up for the service.

BT’s plan to upgrade 25m homes and business to full-fibre by 2026 would now be solely delivered by Openreach.

Mr Jansen said: “We have conducted an extensive review and held discussions with prospective investors. However with fibre to the premise build costs coming down and take-up ahead of expectations, we have decided to retain 100pc of the project for shareholders and to remain fully focused on driving build and take-up.”

Read the full story here.

Alpha Networks, Delta, Edgecore Networks, and UfiSpace are now part of the ecosystem.

ADVA (FSE: ADV) says it has paved the way for its Ensemble Harmony SDN/NFV platform to apply to white-box based disaggregated packet networking by adding relevant companies to its Ensemble Harmony Ecosystem. Alpha Networks, Delta, Edgecore Networks, and UfiSpace are now part of the ecosystem; each has white-box hardware platforms that are proven to interoperate with ADVA’s Ensemble Activator network operating system, according to ADVA.

Ensemble Activator, designed for use with bare-metal switches, is in trials with multiple mobile network operators, including Telefónica and Vodafone. ADVA sees Ensemble Activator as ideal for disaggregated cell site gateways (DCSGs), and the four new ecosystem members are active in the Telecom Infra Project’s DSCG project and related efforts (as is ADVA; see, for example, “Telecom Infra Project targets disaggregated cell site gateways,” “TIM Brazil, Vodafone announce suppliers for TIP Disaggregated Cell Site Gateway trials,” and “AT&T shows off Ufi Space white box cell site gateway router based on OCP specifications”).

Read the full story here.

Africa’s biggest independent tower company operates over 30,000 towers in five African countries, as well as in South America and the Middle East

Over the last few years, telecoms companies all around the world have been offloading their mobile tower infrastructure at an incredible rate. Investor appetite for this infrastructure is at an all-time high right now, allowing for enormous deals to take place, such as Spanish giant Cellnex buying all of CK Hutchison’s European towers earlier this year for around €10 billion.

Now, IHS Towers, Africa’s largest independent towerco, is set to join this flurry of activity, proceeding with an initial public offering (IPO) that would value the business at around $7 billion.

In the filing made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, IHS said it would seek a price between $21 and $24 per share, with intentions of offering 18 million shares itself, with a further 4.5 million to be offered by shareholders.

Read the full story here

Over the past few years, fixed UK telecoms players have shifted their investment strategy from the old copper network to much more flexible, reliable and capable fibre networks

Ofcom stated in the 2020 Connected Nations report that 5.1 million homes have access to full-fibre services, but this is only 18% of UK premises. On the other hand, the UK Government expects industry to reach 85% of premises by 2025, which is a lot of work to do over the next 4 years, with approximately 19 million premises still to be reached: an average of about 4.7 million premises a year.

Read the full story here.

Research finds the satellite industry is gaining a higher orbit with the non-geostationary market a key engine, and with recovery to pre-Covid revenues expected in 2022.

With OneWeb on the rise and Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation about to ramp up from its beta phase, the non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite constellation industry is providing to be a huge spur to the overall satellite market and its market value will double between 2020 to 2030, says consulting and market intelligence firm Euroconsult.

In its report, Satellite connectivity and video market, Euroconsult says the satellite connectivity and video market is projected to exceed $20bn in value by 2030, and NGSO capacity is set to account for more than three-quarters of the projected market growth in the next decade.

The report provides metrics and analysis of the period between 2016 to 2020 for historical trends, and forecasts data and trends for the years 2020 to 2030. It covers 13 world regions and reviews market trends for six segments: video distribution and contribution, cellular backhaul and trunking, enterprise networks, mobility, milsatcom, and consumer broadband.  

In a similar report for 2020, Euroconsult predicted a prolonged market downturn due to Covid and the more structural driver of eroding capacity revenue for video services. The new report validates that finding, reflecting a 5% decrease in market value in 2019 compared with 2020.

Read the full story here.

Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) announced today that Globe Telecom, Inc. (Globe), a major provider of telecom services in the Philippines, deployed Infinera’s Auto-Lambda solution, featuring autotuneable optics, to upgrade its existing 4G access and aggregation networks and in anticipation of providing future 5G services. By upgrading its access network with Infinera’s autotuneable optics technology, Globe can deliver more capacity on its existing network and scale to address bandwidth growth within its current network architecture while reducing both capital and ongoing operational expenses. 

Globe is the leading mobile network operator in the Philippines and offers one of the largest fixed line and broadband networks in the country. With what is believed to be the industry’s first widescale deployment of autotuneable optics over sophisticated amplified ring architectures, Globe is advancing innovation in its access network to address growing capacity demands while evolving its previously deployed IP network to support the increasing demands in mobile backhaul capacity for 5G. Utilizing Infinera’s Auto-Lambda solution, Globe can easily plug autotuneable dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) optics directly into its existing aggregation and access nodes, allowing its network to automatically tune each of the optical signals to the appropriate wavelength, which significantly simplifies deployment while increasing capacity.

“In today’s environment, our customers are always online and want unhindered access and capacity. As one of the leading telecom services in the Philippines, we seek the best technology to support our nation’s connectivity needs,” said Jaeson Evangelista, Head Transport Planning at Globe Telecom. “Our network requires a solution that is easy to deploy and scalable to meet the increasing capacity needs of our customers. We chose Infinera’s Auto-Lambda solution because it provides the innovation and benefits our network needs, from operational simplicity and ease of deployment to cost savings and eliminating the need for new networking hardware. Additionally, Infinera’s autotuneable optics provide a unique solution that enables DWDM upgrades directly into third-party devices in our network, making installation and deployment easy for our engineers.”

Read the full press release on the Infinera website.

Company names new system after the man behind the Baskerville typeface.

Lenovo has delivered a new supercomputer to the University of Birmingham in the UK.

The new system, named Baskerville, is built with 46 Lenovo Neptune liquid-cooled servers each featuring twin Intel Xeon CPUs.

The HPC system features 512GB system RAM and 980Gb local NVMe storage built to support four Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs attached to each system via PCIe gen4 connections.

Academics will use the new system to research applications in computer vision, language processing, molecular modeling, and materials science.

“Lenovo’s technology facilitates new types of research that were previously impractical or impossible. In the last six months, this high-performance computing technology has provided scientists at the University with the resources they need to accelerate their research efforts and generate high impact results far more rapidly than they have ever been able to do before,” said Professor Iain Styles, of the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science and Director of the University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

The system uses water at up to 35°C across both CPU and GPU to cool the systems. Water expelled from the system reaches temperatures of up to 50°C and then cooled again without compressive cooling systems such as air conditioning.

Ian Jeffs, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Group, added: “We are pleased to develop our partnership with the University of Birmingham and provide scientists there with smarter technology to aid complex scientific research that will benefit the scientific and wider public health community. It’s also pleasing to see tangible evidence that our water-cooling technology is improving energy efficiency and sustainability in the data center, which is characteristic of our commitment to delivering greener technology.”

The system is named after John Baskerville, the enlightenment-era Birmingham industrialist responsible for innovations in printing, paper, and ink production. He created a number of typefaces including the Baskerville font.

The University of Birmingham hosts Baskerville as the lead member of a consortium that includes The Rosalind Franklin Institute, The Alan Turing Institute, and Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron light source science facility.

The £4 million ($5.5m) project was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation and a proportion of this service will be available to EPSRC-funded researchers.