Several figures and bodies have warned about the potential impact of Labour’s free state broadband pledge ahead of the UK general election.

For the world’s fifth-largest economy, Britain’s broadband is pitiful. Research conducted by Cable ranks the UK 34th globally with a mean download speed of 22.3Mbps. Even worse, around 10 percent of households are still unable to access fibre broadband.

With the UK’s general election looming,...

During the Conservative Party Conference, Chancellor Sajid Javid pledged £5 billion for gigabit broadband in every home by 2025.

Standing on the steps of Downing Street following his election in July, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made the rollout of gigabit broadband one of his key pledges. The chancellor has now committed public money to help achieve Johnson’s pledge.

"We are setting out plans to invest £5bn to support the rollout of full-fibre, 5G and other gigabit-capable networks to...

Virgin Media COO Jeff Dodds has voiced his enthusiasm for UK PM Boris Johnson’s pledge to speed up the rollout of gigabit broadband.

Johnson, who took office on Wednesday, pledged on the steps of Downing Street in his first speech to make full-fibre broadband across the country.

The current government target set by the outgoing administration is for gigabit broadband to be available across the country by 2033. Johnson called the existing target “laughably unambitious” and promised to deliver...

British Telecom (BT) has launched a ‘stay fast’ speed guarantee for its broadband customers with 24/7 monitoring.

Upon signing up or extending their contract, a customer will now be provided with an upfront personalised speed.

BT will attempt to remotely optimise the line if the speed falls below this mark or will dispatch an engineer to further investigate why the expected speed is not being delivered.

The company says it will monitor customers’ speeds 24/7 to be proactive if service is...

A recently conducted joint innovation project between Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom successfully demonstrated a millimetre wave link with a data transmission rate of 40Gbps.

The live trial, which was organised at the Deutsche Telekom Service Centre in Athens, is a breakthrough moment in the evolution from today’s 10Gbps reality toward the 100Gbps future. It was arranged over a hop distance of 1.4 kilometres in the...

After finding around half of UK homes are on a poor broadband deal, regulator Ofcom has announced plans to boost consumer awareness.

Superfast broadband (defined as 24Mbps+) availability has reached 94 percent of premises, but there’s been less than half uptake.

Ofcom’s investigations have found consumers are often able to receive greatly improved broadband for just slightly more cost per month, or sometimes even less than what they’re currently paying.

The regulator has announced several measures to...

New research has found the US will be dominated by China in the gigabit broadband race, even falling slightly behind Europe.

A report from Rethink Technology predicts 57 percent of gigabit connections by 2023 will be in China, or 68 percent when accounting for Asia as a whole.

Europe will take second place with 18 percent. North America will take an 11 percent share, while Latin America will fall behind...

In his latest budget, UK Chancellor Philip Hammond has announced £250m will be used to provide rural areas with superfast broadband.

Poor rural connectivity has held back certain areas from the rest of the nation.

The funding boost will target rural schools and libraries to ensure they have access to ‘full fibre’ connectivity.

DCMS Secretary of State Jeremy Wright said:

"Through our modern Industrial Strategy, it’s our ambition to have a full fibre Britain that...

CityFibre has set out its plans for an over £2 billion investment to accelerate the rollout of full Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) across the UK.

The company was acquired back in June for £538m by Antin Infrastructure Partners and West Street Infrastructure Partners, a fund managed by Goldman Sachs. CityFibre currently has fibre assets in 37 UK towns and cities.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“With a head-start in 37 towns and cities, this full fibre investment plan...

Germany’s largest telecoms operator, Deutsche Telekom, claims its 5G network is 80 percent ready and expects 99 percent coverage by 2025.

Speaking to a conference of German business leaders, Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges said around 22,000 of the operator's 27,000 mobile sites were now connected to high-speed fibre-optic.

Dirk Wössner, Board Member of Telekom Deutschland, said:

"Everyone wants to be in the high-speed network – across all levels...

An assessment by the UK National Infrastructure Commission highlights areas where investment should be prioritised to prevent shortcomings.

“The whole purpose of the UK’s first-ever National Infrastructure Assessment is to think beyond the technologies of today and to ensure we can make the most of future innovations,” explains Sir John Armitt CBE.

“It’s why it’s not just a one-off but something we will be repeating every five years to ensure we remain on the front...

Openreach is using drones to quickly bring high-speed fibre broadband to rural areas.

The drones help to lay a fibre cable across routes that would have been difficult to deploy across. Due to the small drones used, the actual fibre cable was too heavy for them to lift directly.

Instead, Openreach engineers are using the drones to fly a high-strength fishing line around 100 meters and drop it across the top...

Vodafone is teaming up with CityFibre in a bid to offer a true alternative to Openreach and Virgin Media in the fibre broadband arena.

In the UK today, consumers have two major options when it comes to fibre broadband. You can go with an Openreach-leased network — such as BT, Sky, or TalkTalk — or there’s Virgin Media.

CityFibre is hoping to offer an alternative to these broadband giants...

Nokia is using its experience as a telecoms vendor to help solve home WiFi problems with the announcement of a ‘carrier-grade’ system.

The system is available for carriers to provide to their customers and promises ‘unmatched gigabit coverage to every corner of the home, getting rid of dead zones and interference.’

Nokia plans on achieving this by implementing new ‘Air-IQ’ technology from Broadcom which can identify 17 unique interference...

Verizon is outlining its support for ‘One Touch Make Ready’, a proposal which will enable quicker deployment of fiber by scotching red tape associated with pole attachment.

The proposal has already been trialled out in a handful of US metros with not all parties happy, to say the least; both Comcast and AT&T sued Metro Nashville when the law was passed late last year.

Current timeframes for processing pole attachment requests can take several months. A new ‘attacher’ has to contact...

Openreach, the subsidiary of BT which manages the majority of the UK’s telecoms infrastructure, has today announced plans to recruit 1,500 new engineers using VR to provide training.

Virtual reality is becoming increasingly viewed as useful for training within the workplace, but it’s yet to be used on a large scale for recruitment. Openreach is exploring VR’s potential benefits for recruitment with an experience which allows interested applicants to use a headset to...

(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/dk1234)

Access to superfast broadband and speedy 4G services – that’s the standard across Asia, right? Countries such as South Korea (27 Mbps), Japan (19.5 Mbps) and Singapore (17.2 Mbps) tend to have consistent, high-quality connectivity. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case across the region.

In India, the average speed is only 3.6 Mbps. Although there’s investment in...

(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Caymia)

Approximately 80 percent of homes and businesses connect using Openreach's wholesale network, owned by BT, which means there's a good chance if you're living in...

(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/ollo)

Vodafone claims to have taken an industry lead in removing the line rental from their fiber broadband packages to modernise and make costs much clearer for customers, but it's not quite as it seems.

The various 

(c)iStock.com/Danil Melekhin

With all the talk about the cloud, virtual networks, and ransomware these days, it's easy to forget there's a physical network underneath all these digital services that needs security too. It's the physicality of the fibres and cables that take our data from point A to point B that makes them vulnerable in different ways than what you'd typically envision with a hacker attack.

For example, in the San Francisco area last year there were 16 known attacks where the fibre optic...