FCC looks to raise minimum broadband to 100/20

The FCC is kicking off an inquiry into the state of broadband across the United States, as required by section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, including universal deployment, affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access to services. As part of the inquiry, the FCC will consider the current benchmark for defining broadband.

“During the pandemic and even before it, the needs of internet users surpassed the FCC’s 25/3 standard for broadband.  This standard is not only outdated, it masks the extent to which low-income neighborhoods and rural communities are being left offline and left behind,” said Chairwoman Rosenworcel.  “In order to get big things done, it is essential to set big goals.  That is why we are kicking off this inquiry to update our national broadband standard and also set a long-term goal for gigabit speeds.”

The FCC is proposing that the national fixed broadband speed benchmark be raised to 100 Mbps for download and 20 Mbps for upload. The FCC previously set the benchmark at 25/3 Mbps in 2015 and has not updated it since.  

The FCC also seeks comment on setting a separate national goal of 1 Gbps/500 Mbps for the future. 

https://www.fcc.gov

Read More

BT cites increasing strength in FTTP

BT reported revenue of £10.4bn for the six month period to 30-September, in line with the prior year; adjusted revenue £10.4bn, up 3% on a pro forma basis due to increased fibre-enabled product sales, inflation-linked pricing and improved lower margin trading in Business partially offset  by legacy product declines.  Adjusted EBITDA amounted to £4.1bn, up 6%; and up 4% on a pro forma basis with revenue flow through and strong cost control more than offsetting cost inflation and one-off items in the prior year; Business EBITDA decline due to increased input costs and legacy high-margin managed contract declines.

Reported capital expenditure was  £2.3bn, down 11% with lower fixed network spend driven by lower FTTP build unit costs.

Some highlights

• FTTP build rate accelerated to 66k per week delivering a record of 860k premises passed in the quarter, FTTP footprint is now expanded to 12m premises with a further 6m where initial build is underway
• Strong customer demand in Openreach for FTTP with net adds of 364k in Q2, bringing take-up rate to 33%
• Openreach broadband ARPU grew by 10% year-on-year due to price rises and increased volumes of FTTP; Openreach broadband line losses of 255k in H1, a 1% decline in the broadband base; whilst the company continues to target a decline of around 400k in FY24, softer market conditions increase the risk that losses will be above this level
• Consumer broadband ARPU for the year to date increased 4% year-on-year and Consumer postpaid mobile ARPU for the year to date increased 9% year-on-year; churn for the year to date remains stable for both broadband and postpaid mobile at 1.1% and 1.0% respectively
• In October 'New EE' was launched  with a modern digital platform and a set of converged products and services
• Retail FTTP base grew year-on-year by 48% to 2.2m of which Consumer 2.1m and Business 0.1m; 5G base 9.9m, up 42% year-on-year
• Cost transformation on track with gross annualised cost savings of £2

Philip Jansen, Chief Executive, commenting on the results, said    

“These results show that BT Group is delivering and on target: we’re rapidly building and connecting customers to our next generation networks, we’re simplifying our products and services, and we’re now seeing predictable and consistent revenue and EBITDA growth.

“We’ve strengthened our competitive position with the launch of both New EE and our renewed strategy in Business, and Openreach has now built full fibre broadband to more than a third of the UK's homes and businesses with a growing connection rate. Our transformation programme has now delivered £2.5bn in annualised savings,  well on track to meet our £3bn savings target by FY25.

https://newsroom.bt.com/results-for-the-half-year-to-30-september-2023/

Read More

Dell’Oro: RAN Investments to Top $0.4 Trillion by 2030

After growing at a 2% CAGR in the 4G era, global RAN revenues are projected to increase at a 1% CAGR  between 2020 and 2030. The base case scenario is built on the assumption that RAN revenues peaked in 2021 and will continue to trend downward before picking up momentum in the outer part of the forecast period. 

Despite the current uncertainties, Dell'Oro Group remains optimistic about the long-term growth prospects of the RAN market. The report highlights the importance of operators' assets in addressing evolving connectivity needs, while also discussing emerging opportunities such as Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and private wireless.

Key Messages:
- RAN investments are projected to surpass $0.4 Trillion by 2030
- Macro RAN deployments will dominate the first 6G wave
- Cloud RAN expected to play a leading role with 6G
- Small cells to comprise approximately 15% of the 2030 RAN market

https://www.delloro.com/news/ran-investments-to-top-0-4-trillion-by-2030/

Read More

UK funds £225m “Isambard” AI supercomputer

The University of Bristol and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have been awarded a £225m grant by the UK government to deliver the nation’s fastest supercomputer.

To be known as Isambard-AI, it will be 10 times more powerful than the UK’s current fastest supercomputer and among the most powerful in the world when it opens at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in the summer of 2024.

Isambard-AI will be designed with cutting-edge technologies to drive AI-driven research

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will build and deliver the new system. Isambard-AI will be based on the HPE Cray EX supercomputer,  and consist of 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips which combine NVIDIA’s Arm-based Grace CPU with a Hopper-based GPU optimized for power efficiency and giant-scale AI, along with the latest HPE Slingshot 11 interconnect, and nearly 25 petabytes of storage using the Cray Clusterstor E1000 optimised for AI workflows.



When in psroduction, Isambard-AI will achieve well over 200 PetaFLOP/s using the Top500’s Linpack benchmark, while also achieving over 21 ExaFLOP/s of AI performance to accelerate AI training for large-scale AI, such as large language models. 

The new Bristol facility will be used by a wide range of organisations from across the UK to harness the power of AI, which is already the main driver of emerging technologies such as training large language models (LLMs), big data and robotics. The new supercomputing facility will also play a vital role in important areas such as accelerating automated drug discovery and climate research. 

Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC, AI & Labs at HPE said: "Today's announcement of the UK’s major investment in AI supercomputing underscores its commitment to taking a global leadership position in AI. The Isambard-AI system will harness world-leading supercomputing, including high-performance networking co-developed at HPE's Bristol labs, to provide the performance and scale required for compute-intensive AI projects. We are proud to partner with the UK Government and the University of Bristol to give UK researchers and industry access to Europe's largest AI system for open science."



Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA, said: “In building one of the world's fastest AI supercomputers, the UK is demonstrating the importance for nations to create their own infrastructure. Isambard-AI will provide researchers with the same state-of-the-art AI and HPC compute resources used by the world's leading AI pioneers, enabling the UK to introduce the next wave of AIand scientific breakthroughs.”

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2023/11/uk-government-invests-225m-to-create-uks-most-powerful-ai-supercomputer-with-university-of-bristol-and-hewlett-packard-enterprise.html

Read More

Airtel offers seamless interconnect for other carriers

Bharti Airtel introduced a  wholesale, unified platform for global interconnect with other operators.

“Airtel Advantage” will offer International Voice, A2P, P2A, P2P SMS, Direct Inward Dialing (DID) and International Toll Free Service (ITFS) to other carrier partners.

Airtel promises faster customer onboarding and seamless commencement of interconnects for multiple global locations. Customers can also view real-time traffic statistics and other insights on customized analytics dashboard.

The platform will offer International Voice and SMS to begin with and will add DID and ITFS subsequently.

Vani Venkatesh, CEO - Global Business, Airtel Business said, “We are delighted to offer yet another innovation to our partners. The next-gen platform will place the power in their hands to find a solution of their choice and deploy it, all in a matter of hours. The transparency, agility, reliability and ease of doing business offered by Airtel Advantage will transform the way carriers globally access interconnects”.

https://www.airtel.in/business/

Read More

BT and Ericsson deliver Private 5K for UK's Port of Tyne

The Port of Tyne, one of the UK’s biggest and most important ports, has gone live with a Private 4G and 5G network supplied by Ericsson and BT.

The installation is the UK’s first site-wide deployment of 4G and 5G standalone connectivity for smart port applications. 

The first set of live use cases will begin in November, including video and sensors installed at each gate on the site to use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to securely manage and track vehicle access, as well as 5G-enabled cameras with a 360-degree view at the quayside combined with AI-driven software to provide automated container inspection and identification.

Future applications are expected to include:

• Autonomous Navigation Technology so that vehicles can move cargoes and equipment around the port
• Remote crane operations that will enable operators to work from simulated cabs with precise location information, full HD+ video and sensory haptics
• Connected drones at land and sea to autonomously inspect cranes, quayside, buoys and other physical infrastructure
• Wearable technology and XR devices to be used for immersive training and remote maintenance engineers
• A connected eco-system of AI sensors, video and data sources from inside and outside the port to generate new business intelligence and improve operational efficiency
• Autonomous Navigation Technology so that vehicles can move cargoes and equipment around the port
• Remote crane operations that will enable operators to work from simulated cabs with precise location information, full HD+ video and sensory haptics
• Connected drones at land and sea to autonomously inspect cranes, quayside, buoys and other physical infrastructure
• Wearable technology and XR devices to be used for immersive training and remote maintenance engineers
• A connected eco-system of AI sensors, video and data sources from inside and outside the port to generate new business intelligence and improve operational efficiency

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/3/2023/port-of-tyne-goes-live-with-uks-first-site-wide-private-network-deployment

Read More

Edgeworx launched enterprise edge on Google Cloud

Edgeworx, a start-up based in Berkeley, California, released its enterprise-focused edge native platform on the Google Cloud Marketplace. 

Edgeworx Cloud provides an enterprise-grade foundational edge platform without customer-managed Kubernetes clusters, complicated networking, or custom infrastructure. A secured and decoupled data plane carries all data from device-to-device, microservice-to-microservice, and host-to-client over on-demand private internets obfuscating traffic to everyone, including Edgeworx. 

The company says its lightweight and hardware agnostic agent unifies heterogeneous fleets, which otherwise require specialized and disjointed effort to maintain. Edge deployments and devices can be rolled out and directly managed from any network, no VPN or tunneling required, minimizing effort for developers to remotely orchestrate nodes.

https://www.edgeworx.io

Read More