Eurobites: Townies less likely to sign up for full-fiber broadband than their country cousins – OfcomEurobites: Townies less likely to sign up for full-fiber broadband than their country cousins – Ofcom

Those living in rural areas of the UK are much more likely to sign up for full-fiber broadband than those in the country's towns and cities. That's one of the findings of regulator Ofcom's latest Connected Nations report, which charts the progress made on fiber and 5G rollout. More than half (52%) of homes in rural areas with full-fiber coverage have been tempted to subscribe to full-fiber broadband, whereas the equivalent figure in metropolitan areas is just 32%. The report also found that full-fiber broadband now reaches 20 million UK homes, with the average UK download speeds up to 223 Mbit/s. As for mobile, 5G now carries more than a fifth of all monthly data traffic in the UK, while around half of UK mobile handsets are now 5G-capable.

Telia has found a way of combining hydrogen, fuel cells, solar cells and batteries to considerably lengthen a mobile site's operating time when running on backup power. Traditionally, says Telia, mobile sites use just batteries and diesel generators as secondary power supplies and can only keep operating for another four hours. Using the hydrogen combination, Telia was able to extend this backup time to 110 days. What is more, the hydrogen used can produced on-site using renewable energy and then stored locally until it is needed. The breakthrough was made in a joint pilot carried out by Telia and the Swedish Post & Telecom Authority.

Nokia and UAE operator du are claiming an MEA regional first with the deployment of a commercial 5G standalone cloud RAN offering. The RAN site, located in Abu Dhabi, is based on Nokia's anyRAN approach that includes virtualized distributed units and centralized units running on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers, and Red Hat OpenShift, the hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, to support cloud-native RAN functions across the network.

Virgin Media O2 has connected 1,000 mobile UK sites to its proprietary 10Gbit/s fiber backhaul network. The operator says that the upgrades have been made possible by its recently introduced Converged Interconnect Network, which carries both mobile and fixed traffic. The sites were previously connected to a third-party backhaul link, which, according to VMO2, could act as bottleneck during busy times. (See Eurobites: Virgin Media O2 feels the urge to converge.)

Freshwave, a UK-based mobile infrastructure provider, has secured an additional £100 million (US$127 million) in funding from Guggenheim Investments as part of its expansion plans. Freshwave provides indoor connectivity via small cells, distributed antenna systems and Wi-Fi to buildings across the UK, with customers including stadiums, hospitals and government buildings.

Safaricom's M-Pesa mobile-money platform, which turns 18 in March 2025, has notched up 34 million users in Kenya.