Eurobites: Faulty telecom gets blame for UK sewage calamityEurobites: Faulty telecom gets blame for UK sewage calamity

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Nokia lands router gig at Signetbreedband; Vodafone brings 4G to London's Elizabeth line; VMO2 does more with Netcracker.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

May 15, 2024

3 Min Read
A view of Windermere in England's Lake District
Windermere: More than 10 million liters of raw sewage were dumped into England's largest lake.(Source: Adam Burton/Alamy Stock Photo)
  • A fault on a telecom network has been blamed for a massive sewage spill into Windermere, which is England's largest lake and a magnet for sightseers and watersports enthusiasts. As the BBC reports, more than 10 million liters of raw sewage were illegally dumped into the middle of the lake on the night of February 28 through a pipe owned by United Utilities, though the incident has only just come to light. A pumping station normally sends sewage to a water treatment plant but a fault on a third-party telecom cable network stopped the pumps from working, says the report. United Utilities is now under fire for the time it took to respond to the incident – an engineer did not arrive on site until ten hours after the spill began.

  • Nokia is supplying what it calls "advanced routing capabilities" to Signetbreedband, a Dutch managed network services provider. Nokia has deployed its 7250 interconnect router (IXR) range to create an MPLS-based core network, while also providing routed termination points for all of Signetbreedband's regional points of presence.

  • Vodafone UK has switched on 4G for its customers using the Elizabeth line on London's underground train network. It has already introduced the technology to large sections of other routes, including the Central, Jubilee and Northern lines. The deployment has been carried out in partnership with Transport for London and Boldyn Networks. Vodafone plans to introduce 5G to all stations at some (unspecified) point in the future.

  • Converged UK operator Virgin Mobile O2 (VMO2) is extending its relationship with Netcracker, deploying the US company's flagship Netcracker Digital Platform and implementing a number of professional services such as application development.

  • VMO2 has also hit another milestone in its Shared Rural Network (SRN) mast rollout, with the remote Isle of Eigg, off the coast of Scotland, becoming site number 150. The SRN is a £1 billion (US$1.26 billion) joint initiative between mobile network operators and the UK government to extend 4G connectivity to 95% of the UK's landmass by the end of 2025.

  • Sweden's Telia has signed up as a VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) Pinnacle tier partner to help persuade enterprise customers to adopt VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as their private cloud infrastructure. Sovereign cloud services, which support data residency and other jurisdictional controls, form part of the VMware-powered offer.

  • Eutelsat Communications saw third-quarter revenues grow 8.5% year-over-year in like-for-like terms, to €300.3 million ($325 million). Within that, connectivity-related revenues all achieved double-digit growth, though the video segment saw a 4.9% fall, partly as a result of sanctions against Russia.

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to invest €7.8 billion ($8.4 billion) on several data centers in the German state of Brandenburg over the next decade and a half. As Reuters reports, AWS had previously announced its intention to store data on servers located within the EU to bolster data privacy for governments and their citizens.

  • Odido, the Dutch operator formerly known as T-Mobile, has chosen Ireland's Beyond Now for a business support systems (BSS) revamp.

Read more about:

Europe

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.

Subscribe and receive the latest news from the industry.
Join 62,000+ members. Yes it's completely free.

You May Also Like