Eurobites: Broadband outages almost double in UK – report

All of which possibly takes the shine off the latest Connected Nations report from UK communications regulator Ofcom. The report, covering April and May of this year, found that 75% of UK homes (22.4 million) are now able to access gigabit-capable broadband, up from 73% in January, while 52% of homes were able to access full-fiber broadband, up from 48%. The percentage of homes with access to "superfast" broadband (download speeds of at least 30 Mbit/s) remains stuck on 97% – no change there since September 2022 – while what Ofcom refers to as "decent" broadband, of at least 10 Mbit/s download and 1 Mbit/s upload, has also seemingly topped out, on 99%. On the mobile side, 7% of the UK in geographic terms is still not covered by 4G (down from 8% in January's report), while 5G from at least one operator now reaches 76-85% of all UK premises, up from 73-82% in January.

Italy's Open Fiber says it has successfully tested 50G-PON technology on its FTTH access network. The trial, says the wholesale-only operator, also demonstrated the possibility of running the new 50GB service in parallel with existing offerings, such as XGS-PON.

The European Commission has designated its first set of "gatekeepers," large companies whose far-reaching "core platform services" mean that they will have to comply with particular obligations under the terms of the Digital Markets Act. They are basically Big Tech's usual suspects, namely Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. Initially, Samsung was also lined up to be in the gatekeeper gang, but the Commission decided that its proprietary Internet browser didn't make the grade. In parallel, the Commission has also begun four investigations to further look into Microsoft's and Apple's submissions arguing that, despite meeting the thresholds, some of their core platform services – Bing and iMessage among them – do not qualify as "gateways" under the terms of the Act. (See Eurobites: EU targets the online 'gatekeepers' with new law.)

French Wi-Fi specialist Airties has hooked up with Norway's Domos to offer the promise of improved latency management to broadband service providers worldwide. Specifically, Airties and Domos will jointly own the latency monitoring software module, which is based on Domos' existing module and will be embedded into Airties Smart Wi-Fi software.

Sparkle, the international services arm of Telecom Italia (TIM), has activated commercial service on the first section of the BlueMed subsesa cable connecting Palermo to Genoa and Milan. Each fiber pair boasts a throughput of 30 Tbit/s (Tbps), which, says Sparkle, is currently the highest subsea backbone capacity per fiber pair in service in the Mediterranean region.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading