#ofcom-auction

#ofcom-auction

Customers of the UK's major broadband providers must receive payments when their connection stops working and is not fixed after two working days, under a voluntary scheme organised by communications regulator Ofcom.

Daisy Cooper urged the Financial Conduct Authority to investigate Nigel Farage over his involvement with bitcoin treasury firm Stack BTC, following a promotional video where Farage executed a £2 million bitcoin purchase on its behalf.

"For the first time, a rigid office attendance mandate has been broken and replaced with a more sensible, flexible approach based on what actually works," General Secretary Fran Heathcote said. "This has been a long campaign and reaching a deal members could accept reflects the determination of PCS members at ONS, the hard work of their reps and the value of trade unionism."

Vodafone EVO promises greater flexibility and control over sole traders' digital lives by enabling them to pay for their phone and airtime separately, creating monthly plans that suit their needs better than any off-the-shelf subscription.

The UK has about 1.59GW of currently installed datacentre capacity at just under 190 sites. If we add existing capacity to that which is planned to complete by 2030 and which has planning consent, we get 4.9GW.

The study concludes that the rail link could deliver strong economic returns under both two-runway and three-runway expansion scenarios at Heathrow Airport, indicating its potential impact on regional connectivity.

Project Spark is designed to fundamentally reshape how high-capacity services in the UK are built, priced and delivered, supporting the next wave of digital infrastructure expansion.

Openreach has constructed a digital twin of the UK's transportation corridors, integrating data for 35 million homes and businesses with national road, rail and waterway networks and its existing fibre infrastructure.

After an extensive two-and-a-half-year investigation, the CMA published its findings in July 2025. The report was explicit: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft together account for roughly 80% of the UK's cloud services market, a duopoly so deeply entrenched that the watchdog recommended both companies be designated with strategic market status.

Last year the UK declared that Apple and Google were a duopoly with " strategic market status" in the mobile platforms market, making them subject to special regulations. However, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will not regulate Google and Apple's app stores like the EU has done. Rather, government plans to enforce its own digital markets rules in a "pragmatic" way by accepting "commitments" from Apple and Google in areas like app rankings, the CMA announced.

Which? claimed that Qualcomm abused its market position as a dominant producer of processors and radio chips for smartphones, and that even Samsung and Apple felt they had no alternative but to pay inflated prices for some parts and then passed on the costs to buyers. UK consumers, the group argued, therefore paid more for certain smartphones between October 2015 and January 2024.

In its strategy to maintain acceptable performance levels for mobile users, VMO2 has expanded its relationship with infrastructure modernisation firm Zinkworks. VMO2) added that it is building on two years of experience monitoring its fixed broadband network, where the technology is said to have reduced repair times by more than a third, cutting the need for engineer visits by 12%.

The mass roll-out of fibre networks is seen as the key to the expansion of digital services across major economies, but research from Kearney is warning that a €174bn funding shortfall facing Europe's telecoms sector is putting 2030 gigabit and 5G connectivity targets at risk, meaning around 45 million Europeans could remain without adequate high-speed connectivity by the end of the decade.

The UK government claims a new Telecoms Consumer Charter will stop customers being hit by unexpected bill increases and offer clearer pricing when signing up to deals. Britain's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) says major telco providers - BT, Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), the newly conjoined VodafoneThree, Sky, and TalkTalk - have signed up to new commitments under the charter. The charter, however, appears to be nothing more than a voluntary code of conduct with no legal enforcement.