Telegraph

Unveiling London’s first long term infrastructure investment plan, Mayor Boris Johnson said the world’s first major ‘5G’ mobile network will be deployed in the city by 2020, working in collaboration with the University of Surrey.

Google is exploring building ultrafast fibre optic networks in British cities, in a move that would add to pressure on British Telecommunications to further upgrade its ageing infrastructure.

Google has held detailed talks with a recently listed British company called CityFibre, with a view to extending its Google Fiber project outside the US for the first time. The discussions broke down amid concerns from CityFibre that an existing partnership with BSkyB would be threatened.

Teenagers are moving away from ‘traditional’ social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in favour of mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat.

According to the latest GlobalWebIndex report, the percentage of teens active on Facebook dropped by 9 per cent during 2013. Falls were also recorded for YouTube (7 per cent), Twitter (3 per cent) and Google+ (4 per cent).

This does not mean that mainstream social networks are dead and buried -- Facebook is still the leading app for teenagers, and by the end of 2013, 66 per cent of teens were members of the site. However, Jason Mander, head of trends at GlobalWebIndex, said that teenagers are using these networks less actively, and for fewer things. At the same time, the report, based on interviews with 170,000 users in 32 counties, detected a rise in newer social networks like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr, along with mobile messaging services.

Snapchat is the fastest growing social media app among teens, with this demographic more than twice as likely as others to be using it. Mander said that messaging apps are popular among teens because they are more convenient and cheaper than text messaging. However, Mander said that these apps are particularly attractive to teenagers because they are more private than traditional social networks, and this generation is increasingly concerned about its digital footprint.

The global music industry body has attacked Google for failing to address Internet piracy after revealing a $600 million (£362 million) decline in worldwide music sales in 2013.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said the search engine had “not been effective” and “could do so much more” to prevent illegal music downloading, which the industry says costs it billions in revenues every year.

It came as the IFPI’s annual review of the industry revealed a 3.9-percent fall in global recorded music sales in in 2013, despite a massive increase in consumers’ spending money on music streaming.