Eurobites: UK Tucks £40M Into 5G Testbed

In a separate but related development, Wright also announced that the UK government is to launch a consultation on how to simplify planning processes in an effort to make it easier for UK network operators to expand their 4G networks and more easily roll out their 5G networks.

Coats, a UK-based industrial textiles giant, has chosen SD-WAN technology from California's Aryaka to connect its various locations in China to its European offices, replacing an existing MPLS-based set-up. The project was completed in partnership with GAB Enterprise IT Solutions.

Israel's Pelephone, a service provider focused on consumer IoT, has joined Amdocs' eSIM platform, enabling it to launch eSIM-enabled devices in its market, starting with the Apple Watch. (See Apple: It's the End of the SIM as We Know It.)

GPON and XGS-PON technologies from Germany's DZS Keymile have been chosen by Full Fibre, a broadband wholesaler based in the south west of England, for its new fiber network. Full Fibre is currently using DZS Keymile's modular V8106 OLT platform in a beta environment and a pilot project is underway now.

Vodafone UK has been attempting to demonstrate the point of 5G by inviting "YouTube sensation" Tom Cassell, otherwise known, for some reason, as "Syndicate," to test-run a number of cloud-based games from Hatch. The demo, which took place at the Bullring shopping mall in Birmingham, live-streamed the action via Vodafone's 5G network, allowing computer science students from the local university to take on the gaming superstar. Well it beats going to the library…

UKCloud, which sells multicloud services to the the UK's public sector, is integrating the Moogsoft AIOps platform into its offer. Moogsoft correlates alerts from various monitoring systems used in the UKCloud "stack" into a single interface, helping pinpoint the location of any potential trouble.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading