Nic Fildes

The economics of rolling out connections to the most rural parts of Africa presents a hefty challenge for the hopes of many in the telemedicine world. Data compiled by M-Lab, an open source project backed by Google and various universities, shows that Madagascar is the only African country with broadband speeds anywhere close to those available in Europe and Asia, as a submarine cable lands on the island. Most other African nations rely on 3G and 4G signals, or long-distance WiFi technology Wi-Max.

Liberty Global and Telefónica have struck a landmark deal to combine their British operations O2 and Virgin Media in a £31.4bn agreement that will reshape the UK’s telecoms market. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will have equal ownership of O2 and Virgin Media and have built-in mechanisms for a potential float of the combined business in three years.

Better mobile phone coverage in the British countryside has moved a step closer after the government and the telecoms regulator backed an industry plan to share masts and build new towers in very remote areas. Mobile operators spent months thrashing out an agreement to allow access to each other’s masts in rural areas to improve patchy coverage, but it was contingent on Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, revising the rules of an impending sale of spectrum for 5G services. The regulator on Oct 25 confirmed the changes had been agreed.

Nyarugusu on the border of Tanzania and Burundi, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, is an unlikely pioneer in how the telecoms industry views refugees. Established in 1996, it has population of 150,000. Vodacom, Vodafone’s African arm, installed a 3G tower within Nyarugusu in 2016, which it now shares with commercial rivals Tigo and Airtel. The tower is running at full capacity, according to the GSMA, the mobile industry trade body, but more striking is the average revenue per user of $4.40. That is slightly higher than the average revenue per user for the rest of Tanzania.

An overhaul of Europe’s telecoms laws, aimed at stimulating investment in new networks, has been branded a missed opportunity for the industry. The new European electronic communications code, the biggest shake-up in the sector’s governance since 2009, was approved on June 6. The agreement coincided with the release of a European Court of Auditors report that showed the European Union’s goal of connecting half of the region’s households to ultrafast broadband with speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020 was well behind target.

Ofcom has launched an investigation into whether Three and Vodafone, the UK telecoms operators, are “throttling” certain services on their networks in contravention of European Union rules on net neutrality. The investigation could have a profound impact on how telecoms groups across Europe manage traffic, and whether they continue to offer customers unlimited access to certain types of content — such as social media apps or music streaming services — on top of normal data usage restrictions.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai pledged to clamp down on any unfair behaviour by US broadband companies following the scrapping of net neutrality rules, saying “fear mongering” about the internet will gradually fade. "Some of the headlines that, quote, this is the end of internet as we know it have been proven completely wrong.

In some upside-down logic from the land of down under, Australian consumers have been able to upgrade their broadband internet access to the latest fibre-optic lines, only to receive slower speeds than over ageing copper wires. Such experiences are the absurd result of a grandiose government plan to bankroll what was supposed to be the world’s most advanced broadband network, called NBN.

Peers have dropped a demand for a minimum broadband speed of 30 megabits per second to be a legal requirement, as the Digital Economy Bill is rushed through parliament before the general election.

The government has pushed for a “universal service obligation” to be part of the legislation, with a benchmark minimum speed of 10Mbps — far lower than the “superfast” level the House of Lords had been demanding. The government has also dropped a 2020 deadline for that threshold to be introduced. The Lords amended the bill in February to raise the minimum obligatory speed to 30Mbps, saying 10Mbps would “unfit for usage in a very short time”. But both the government and Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, have argued that the universal service obligation should be raised over time and introduced by secondary legislation when deemed appropriate.

British Telecom and Ofcom have struck a deal about the future of the company’s Openreach broadband division after it agreed to transfer 32,000 staff into a legally separate company.

The agreement ends two gruelling years of debate between the telecoms regulator and BT over the future governance of Openreach, which owns the fibres and wires that provide homes and businesses with broadband. It is the biggest shake-up in the regulation of British telecoms in a decade. The deal finally removes the lingering threat of a full break up of BT and Openreach that rivals Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone had pushed for. The compromise to legally separate the network business and put in its own board is designed to give it more power to set its own strategy and invest in faster broadband services. But critics have questioned whether the move will lead to greater investment in ‘full fibre’ networks.