Eurobites: Four-player mobile markets deliver lower prices for consumers, says Ookla study

In a study that probably won't be cited in a Vodafone press release anytime soon, research and testing firm Ookla has concluded that four-player mobile markets deliver lower prices for consumers and that market concentration is not a robust predictor of network coverage outcomes. The study comes in the wake of a report by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, in which he set forth his belief that consolidation between operators was the key to European telecom remaining competitive on the global stage. But it's not a straightforward picture: In Ookla's opinion, three-player markets in the EU and other high-income countries "exhibit better network performance and consumer sentiment outcomes," pointing out that of the top ten European countries ranked by median download speed in Q2-Q3 2024, seven are three-player markets. The other three – Denmark, Sweden and France – are four-player markets where, says Ookla, mobile operators go in for a significant amount of network-sharing. (See Vodafone-Three merger to leave Brits worse off, says new research and Eurobites: Vodafone-Three merger faces more flak.)

BT has added SSE (security service edge) capabilities from Fortinet to its SD-WAN services, an upgrade that BT says will help its customers shift from managed SD-WAN to secure access service edge (SASE) and protect access to their applications and data in the cloud through such features as a firewall-as-a-service and secure web gateway. The two companies have already been working together for a decade or so.

Under-employed boffins at Deutsche Telekom have been using AI to make music from anonymized mobile data, creating what they chillingly describe as the "Melody of Europe." Each data point, representing the total mobile network activity in a given hour, was converted into a musical note, with higher intensities producing higher-pitched sounds, explains the operator. The live premiere of the resulting euro-banger takes place this week, as part of Deutsche Telekom's Network Day.

The Vodafone Foundation has launched an anti-cyberbullying app in Portugal. Called Tozi, the app made its debut in Ireland last year. It aims to offer content that raises awareness of cyberbullying and helps young people to deal with it. This Portuguese version was launched in partnership with APAV, a victim support charity.

A new report from Broadband Genie reveals the UK's slowest and fastest streets for broadband. In the crawler lane we have Greenfields Road in the northern English town of Bishop Auckland, which clocks in with average speeds of 0.35 Mbit/s. This, says Broadband Genie, makes it 2,634 times slower than the UK’s fastest residential road, Tynemouth Street in London, where the locals bask in speeds averaging 921.76 Mbit/s. Weirdly, nine of the ten slowest-ranked streets – all languishing under 1 Mbit/s – do have access to "superfast" broadband of at least 30 Mbit/s. Overall, UK streets averaged a broadband speed of 81.97 Mbit/s in the survey, for which Broadband Genie recorded and analyzed more than 207,000 speed tests.