Eurobites: TalkTalk turns to GPON/XGS-PON for new fiber network up north

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Citymesh and TowerEye combine on private networks; Glasgow's 5G is miles better than London's; Telxius deploys 400 GigE.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

September 17, 2021

3 Min Read
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Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Citymesh and TowerEye combine on private networks; Glasgow's 5G is miles better than London's; Telxius deploys 400 GigE.

  • UK broadband and pay-TV provider TalkTalk is to get a new GPON/XGS-PON FTTx network serving customers in northwest England courtesy of a collaboration between DZS, a Texas-based optical and packet-based mobile transport specialist, and Freedom Fibre, a fiber network provider based in Manchester, UK. Once completed, the the 18-month rollout will bring high-grade residential broadband services to more than 130,000 subscribers in the region.

    • Belgium's Citymesh has joined forces with TowerEye to bring temporary private 4G and 5G connections for festivals and other large-scale events. The connectivity is intended to help with the scanning of tickets, contactless payments and COVID-19 mitigation measures, among other things. Citymesh's expertise is in private LTE, while TowerEye specializes in wireless networks and camera surveillance.

    • If you want 5G with real zip, you need to get out of London. That's one possible conclusion to draw from the latest Rootmetrics report on 5G in the UK, which found that Glasgow (144.3 Mbit/s), Birmingham (143.5 Mbit/s) and Belfast (130.8 Mbit/s) are the three cities with the fastest aggregate 5G speeds in the country. London, meanwhile, ranked a lowly sixth for speed and seventh for availability. In terms of operators, BT-owned EE ruled the roost, posting the highest 5G availability in the UK's three fastest 5G cities and in the three biggest cities as well.

    • Telxius, which is based in Spain but boasts a subsea portfolio connecting the US, Latin America, Europe and beyond, has deployed 400 GigE technology throughout its network, courtesy of Ciena and Infinera.

    • Telecom Italia (TIM) has appointed Quang Ngo Dinh as CEO of subsidiary Olivetti, which these days is predominantly concerned with the Internet of Things. Rome-born Quang's track record takes in spells at Wind and Vodafone, and he joined TIM Group in September 2019.

    • Vodafone Greece is drawing on VMware technology to launch its own-brand SD-WAN offering.

    • Sweden's Enea has landed a $3.5 million analytics deal with an unnamed North American vendor of cloud networking products covering what Enea calls embedded traffic classification software. The vendor in question will embed Enea's Qosmos ixEngine in its SD-WAN offering to provide detailed traffic information used for WAN optimization, QoS, firewalling and reporting.

    • Sir Clive Sinclair, the British inventor who made home computing popular and in a sense presaged the rise of the smartphone with his ZX series of computers in the early 1980s, has died at the age of 81. In an interview with the BBC in 2013, Sir Clive revealed that he didn't use computers any more, seeing them as a distraction from more important work. "My wife very kindly looks after that [the computing side of things] for me," said Sir Clive.

      — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

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About the Author

Paul Rainford

Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

Paul is based on the Isle of Wight, a rocky outcrop off the English coast that is home only to a colony of technology journalists and several thousand puffins.

He has worked as a writer and copy editor since the age of William Caxton, covering the design industry, D-list celebs, tourism and much, much more.

During the noughties Paul took time out from his page proofs and marker pens to run a small hotel with his other half in the wilds of Exmoor. There he developed a range of skills including carrying cooked breakfasts, lying to unwanted guests and stopping leaks with old towels.

Now back, slightly befuddled, in the world of online journalism, Paul is thoroughly engaged with the modern world, regularly firing up his VHS video recorder and accidentally sending text messages to strangers using a chipped Nokia feature phone.

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