Potential acquirers include Virgin Media O2 and its parent companies
Trooli, a fibre altnet provider in the UK, is up for sale. A number of buyers are eyeing it up, including Virgin Media O2 and the two groups who own the joint venture, Liberty Global and Telefónica.
The price tag is expected to be more than £100 million, Sky News says.
Liberty Global, Telefónica and InfraVia Capital Partners set up Nextfibre as a fibre altnet the UK last year with the goal of passing 7 million premises. Virgin Media O2 is its anchor client.
Trooli’s aims are more modest – to pass 1 million premises in rural and semi-rural areas in south-east England by the end of 2024. Having failed to secure another round of funding last year, it has been seeking a new investor or buyer since.
The UK has more than 100 altnet fibre providers, consolidation is to be expected, and especially as tougher economic conditions begin to bite.
At the beginning of February, one of the largest, CityFibre, announced the loss of 400 jobs – about 20% of its workforce – as it seeks to cut costs The Telegraph reported.
Regulatory issues
Regulation is also having a big impact: Cityfibre, other alt-net providers and their backers have complained to regulator Ofcom that planned wholesale price cuts, by BT’s semi-detached access division, Openreach, will inhibit investment in fibre build-out to the tune of £20 billion. Openreach’s new pricing structure, known as Equinox 2, was announced last December.
Previously CityFibre unsuccessfully appealed against Equinox 1 in December 2021, taking issue with Ofcom’s decision-making process – how it reached its conclusion regarding the fairness of the pricing.
Others weight in early in 2022, with BT and Sky Broadband supporting Ofcom’s decision on Equinox but smaller altnets like County Broadband, Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre and others taking CityFibre’s part.
Telcos, mobile operators and comms service providers (CSPs) are wasting their money and their customers’ time on self service tools, because people still prefer talking to people, according to a survey of 10,000 of them. However, CSPs should not give up on DIY tools because they are on the verge of solving the riddle of why users refuse to help themselves when it means they could jump the customer service queue. According to the feedback from CSP customers, they are desperately keen to embark on the ‘digital journey’ to self support, it’s just that the signposts are baffling.
Only 13% of CSP customers use chatbots, apps, websites and other so-called digital self-service tools. Younger consumers are most likely to use the tools and there is a clear divide between demand for self service and adoption of it, which indicates that CSPs are not making self-service easy enough. The issue is critical because 42% of consumers said they might defect to a rival that offered a significantly better self-service experience. Most (65%) customer journeys are digitised, however, which indicates that CSPs have not made their support tools user friendly enough.
It could be that people like speaking to human operators and don’t want to lose the qualities of reassurance and trust that are exuded by the human voice. Despite the fact that many human operators are forced to stick to a script, they are still deemed to be more helpful than a machine. Ultimately, CSPs are not getting the most out of their self-service tools and, by reining in their human operators with robotic scripts, they are not getting the most out of their human resources either.
“While service providers report high levels of digitalisation and automation, the reality is that it’s rare for a consumer to complete a journey end-to-end digitally. A frictionless digital customer experience is vital today and will only continue to grow in importance as consumer demand for self-service channels increases and new technologies like AI allow for innovation,” said Gil Rosen, Chief Marketing Officer at Amdocs, “the clear take-away from these findings is that CSPs should refine and refocus their customer engagement strategy, while continuing to invest in upskilling their human agents.”
The problem is that 63% of CSP decision makers surveyed said that implementation of AI and ML is a major challenge. As a result, this technology is not yet having a significant impact on their customers’ engagement with digital channels. In the meantime, however there is nothing to stop the communications service providers from communicating their services better, by giving their human operators more creative license.
Sponsored: Our homes are targets for cyber crime writes Michael Schachter
Every device in every home that is connected to the Internet through a router is vulnerable to malware infection, phishing and ransomware attacks, botnets and privacy intrusions.
These can lead to anything from an annoyance to loss of valuable data and money. But the situation is not static. We are making it worse by converting our homes into smart homes. That’s not to say that we are at fault for the attacks.
But we are opening the door to more attacks by providing more and more devices that can be attacked on our networks. For sure, smart homes will make our lives easier. But without proper attention to security, our own homes can turn against us.
When it comes to security, many smart devices are not that smart. Devices such as light bulbs, surveillance cameras and household appliances are often designed around very basic computing architectures that are robust enough to execute their primary tasks. But they do not have the resources to support cybersecurity software. Even if some do have basic security built-in, most end users do not make the effort to change default passwords or to use settings that could prevent attacks.
What’s worse is that with a growing number of smart devices attached to the network, each one acting as a doorway into the network, the likelihood of an attack increases along with the likelihood that one of those doorway devices will infect other devices in the network. Our home is supposed to be our fortress, but not if we leave all the doors and windows open and unprotected.
Smart Homes and IoT are already big business and they are going to be huge. According to Statista, the global Smart Home market is expected to reach $139B in 2023, increasing by 60% by 2027 to nearly $223B. Frost & Sullivan estimates that by 2025, a family of 4 in developed markets will own an average of 47 devices.
Despite the worldwide penetration of smart devices in homes, it is unlikely that most manufacturers will take security into serious consideration when designing their new products. And why should they when their end users are not likely to activate security features in most cases? Regulation could eventually require smart home device manufacturers to incorporate more security features in their devices. But the ultimate decision whether or not to be protected falls into the hands of the end users. Not an optimal scenario.
Lots of devices to protect and lots of vulnerabilities
On lists of ‘Steps you can take to protect yourself from cyber attacks’, one recommendation that inevitably appears is ‘educate yourself about cyber attacks’. This is advice given to people who do not change their default passwords or update their operating systems.
Endpoint cybersecurity solutions have their merits, as long as the end user is able and willing to install, configure and maintain the definitions and updates on each device they want to protect – which is a rare occurrence. In a smart home, or even in a home with connected computers, phones and perhaps a few smart devices, endpoint solutions are unwieldy. And what’s worse, many smart devices do not have the capacity to run endpoint security software. For example, while your smart TV or surveillance cameras are connected to the home router, and thus to all of the other devices on the network, there is no way to individually protect each device with software-based endpoint solutions.
Consumers need to be very tech savvy to be their own CISOs
Installing and maintaining endpoint security and firewall protections in the home is not a simple task for most, but without those protections, laptops; tablets; smartphones connecting to Wi-Fi; and IoT devices, such as smart speakers, smart TVs, networked appliances, surveillance cameras, and even solar panel installations, are at great risk of compromise. Most home networks include devices with software, firmware, or operating systems (OSs)—iOS, Android, MacOS, Linux, Windows, etc.—that users have not updated in months and some devices are so old that manufacturers no longer provide security updates.
What does a network-native security service look like?
All is not lost. Broadband providers can step in and offer their subscribers a set of cybersecurity services that operate directly within the operator’s network. A network-native solution can be easily provisioned to subscribers who can then easily configure the service to protect the devices connected to the router, via a single unified interface such as an app or the operator’s portal. Even without special configuration, they are immediately protected from many threats because the default settings already deliver upgraded security.
This can empower consumers and small offices to set a higher security standard for all devices, regardless of the OS. For customers who have home internet and mobile internet from a converged network operator, the solution ensures smartphones, wireless telecom-capable tablets, and laptops connected to both smartphone hot spots as well as the home router, will have the same clean incoming and outgoing network traffic everywhere, regardless of location.
Network operators are uniquely positioned to offer cybersecurity that protects the whole home network and all the devices connected to the home router. This also holds true for small businesses using a CPE business router in addition to mobile connectivity.
This set of circumstances offers the network operator a unique opportunity to be the primary provider of cybersecurity to consumer and small business customers. They manage all the traffic to and from the customer’s router, smartphones and other connected devices.
They already have a relationship with their customers and have multiple touchpoints making it easy to onboard customers to a new security service and, according to a consumer survey by Allot, 82% of respondents believe that the internet provider should manage security for subscribers’ home and small business networks, either for an additional fee or as a premium connectivity/security bundle.
Network operators have a number of options when it comes to offering cybersecurity to their consumer customers. For mobile service providers, software running in the core network can protect individual mobile users by isolating suspicious and known malicious sites and URLs so that they can be blocked when end users try to link to them.
This, in practice, makes it impossible for attacks to get started. Phishing, ransomware, viruses and other types of malware often rely on human error. When that avenue is blocked, attacks cannot get off the ground and subscribers are, therefore, protected. These types of service can be offered as part of the core offering to act as a differentiator for consumers who are increasingly aware of dangerous internet traffic.
For fixed broadband providers, the home or small business router plays an important role in protecting the subscriber and all the devices connected to their network. In addition to the core network element in the cybersecurity solution, the network provider can also insert a thin client into the router which is regularly updated ‘over the air’ with definitions from a cloud-based resource which itself is frequently updated from multiple sources of threat definitions. The router can then identify and protect the devices connected to it from attacks, rendering the whole network protected from cyber threats.
For both mobile and fixed broadband solutions, content filtering controls can also be a part of the package. This gives parents and office managers the peace of mind that their children/employees are protected from malicious sites and content that should not be accessed. When a network operator implements both mobile and fixed cybersecurity solutions, they can offer a powerful service that protects their customers at home, at work, and on the go.
Not only can cybersecurity be a consumer service that satisfies the demands of customers. It can also be a new source of recurring revenue. And because onboarding requires no effort on the part of the subscriber, adoption rates can be exceptionally high. Best of all, surveys and real world deployments convincingly show that consumers will pay for built-in network-native security. It turns out that, for network operators, consumer security pays.
About the author
Michael Schachter, Director of Product Marketing, Allot
Mobile operator group Vodafone has unveiled a prototype of a 5G network in a box for those who want to build their own internal ‘local radio network’ for a fraction of the cost of buying a 5G router. The motivation for investing time in in such a venture is still not clear but demystifying the technology could ‘democratise it’ 9popularise) said Vodafone’s chief architect. The prototype will be unveiled as Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.
In a demo at its London offices, Vodafone representatives displayed the prototype built from a software-defined radio (SDR) chipset developed by Lime Microsystems, a Raspberry Pi 4 personal computer and core and radio software from French vendor Amarisoft, reported Telecom TV. Yago Tenorio, Vodafone’s network architecture director said it can run any 5G core software stack and RAN software suitable for a small network.
The cost of building such a device, which could be used by consumers or small businesses to extend 5G coverage or to create a private 5G network, will be the same as making a Wi-Fi router, according to the operator. Vodafone has not decided how to exploit this software defined radio but it could “turn any computing platform into a miniature 5G base station,” which means that in addition to being a small portable network-in-a-box, it could be linked to an edge computing platform to provide a local extension to a public 5G network.
The network-in-a-box idea was conceived and developed at Vodafone’s European R&D centre in Málaga, Spain, where a team of engineers are focused on the development of chipsets for Open RAN networks.
Vodafone says there is nothing proprietary in the box and nothing that couldn’t be put together by any other company. “No one else has been bothered to do it but we have,” said Tenorio.
Small businesses and households could learn how to extend and strengthen their 5G network signal to cover all eventualities, agreed the technically minded readers of ISP Review, but that seemed to be the only consensus they reached. One critic, ‘Dazmatic’, pointed out that Wifi 6 doesn’t tie the customer in with one service provider, is quicker and doesn’t need fancy modems. However, there are circumstances where fibre doesn’t reach, even in London, where BT’s ‘broadband actually runs at 5MBPS over copper cable.
In certain circumstances this could fill the gaps left by the broadband providers (see broadband story). Vodafone said that by combining the power of its pan-European 5G network with the ‘simplicity’ and versatility of a Raspberry Pi, it could make 5G-based mobile private networks (MPNs) more accessible to the 22 million small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Europe. It could also offer households extended coverage providing an additional fast broadband link at times when many residents are online simultaneously.
Vodafone is now looking at ways to popularise MPNs and extend their benefits to micro and small business owners whilst cutting the entry cost and reducing the resources needed to experience new digital services. Since ‘5G network on a Raspberry Pi’ is portable and no bigger than a home Wi-Fi router, this should mean a customer could instantly set up their very own, private network in a public place. What Raspberry Pi did for computing, it can do for 5G, according to Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone’s Director of Network Architecture. However, some might argue that user friendly interfaces ushered in the era of popular computing. However that was in a time when there were no Youtube videos available to walk people through the installation.
“This may be prototype, but it has the potential to bring new cloud, AI and big data technologies within reach of many of the small businesses we support across Europe,” said Vodafone’s Tenorio. “The next step is to take ideas like this to a place where they can be developed and eventually produced. Our door is open to interested vendors.”
See the Vodafone the 5G network on a Raspberry Pi at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, from Monday 27 February.
Fujitsu has promised telco carriers it can give them a combination boiler that functions as both a virtualized 5G base station and multi-access edge computing (MEC). Its guided by artificial intelligence and has unlimited potential for processing apps like augmented and virtual reality. Since all these apps can use the same computing resources, they can be shared and re-allocated according to needs, so it’s cheap, powerful and energy efficient. It’s achieved with a 5G vRAN system comprising Fujitsu’s virtualized computing unit (vCU) and virtualized distribution (vDU) with NVIDIA’s GPU technology.
Fujitsu supplemented the vRAN technology that it unveiled in March 2022 with chip maker Nvidia’s A100X Graphical processing engine and its Aerial SDK. These allow it to carry out base station processing while laying down a complete artificial intelligence framework that copes with any workload, from carriers to enterprise customers. The system creates parallel base station and computing functions pooling its units of processing power (GPUs) and allocating these resources. The GPUs can be used for more processing power for wireless comms and scale for future antenna technology improvements as needed.
Telcos and enterprise customers can now get digitisation on a global scale, said Masaki Taniguchi, Senior Vice President at Fujitsu’s Mobile System Business Unit. The system was developed as part of the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem (OREC) project promoted by NTT DoCoMo, which also supported performance verification and evaluation tests of the new solution.
“The software defined 5G vRAN and edge AI applications in an all-in-one, GPU accelerated, system. By combining NVIDIA’s Aerial for 5G, XR for virtual reality and Omniverse for digital twins, the same GPU enabled server can power AI applications and provide an immersive experience of digital and real twins world, over a 5G network,” said Sadayuki Abeta, Global Head of Open RAN Solutions at NTT DoCoMo.
The system applies NVIDIA’s GPU processing engine A100X to the physical layer processing at the base station, which allows for parallel processing of virtualized base stations and edge applications on GPU hardware resources in an all-in-one configuration that allows each function to be built on the same server. This is what enables telcos to build a flexible open network with a simple device configuration that can be ramped up with a variety of functions. The solution further offers more radio unit (RU) capacity and processing power, provides a high-quality communications environment, and is able to handle high-load data processing along with future improvements in antenna technologies.
With this new system, Fujitsu aims to contribute to the global expansion of the open 5G network in cooperation with telecom operators including NTT DoCoMo.
See it at the Fujitsu stand at MWC Barcelona 2023, from February 27.
CEO says something’s wrong when telcos are relying on selling off assets and diversifying to stay in business
Orange for hitting all its fiscal 2022 targets in tough conditions. Annual revenues were up 0.6%, largely due to a continued growth performance in Africa and the Middle East (up 6.4% compared with 2% in Europe).
Before we get into those details, the most interesting thing by far about the press conference and other sessions held on Capital Markets Day was this from CEO, Christel Heydemann, who has been in the job for less than a year.
She observed that there is something very odd going on in the market when an industry as indisputably essential as telecoms is having to sell off assets – such as towers – or develop special financial vehicles or try to diversify because it cannot make a high enough return on investment to continue investing in infrastructure from its core activities. How right she is.
This is what Orange’s reset via its short term new strategy, to 2025, is about.
The not-so-gory details
Meanwhile, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation and special losses (EBITDAaL) reached almost €13 billion, rising 2.5% in line with the target, thanks to “costdiscipline”. Between 2019 and 2022, the group made cost savings of €700 million, which would’ve been worth close to a €1 billion without rising inflation.
A robust performance of Africa & Middle East (+11.3%) offset the sharp decline in Enterprise (-18.8%). This decline is interesting, given that Orange Business, as Orange Business Services will henceforth be known, is one the four pillars of Orange’s new strategy, Lead the Future – see this analysis but was perhaps the biggest punch in the eye on the balance sheet.
Europe grew 1.6% thanks to the recovery in Spain. All other segments contributed to EBITDAaL growth in 2022.
In the fourth quarter, EBITDAaL rose by 8.5% due to price increases in Europe and “a base effect” linked to the employee shareholding scheme. If the scheme is left out of the equation, then EBITDAaL rose by 2.9%.
Romanian rebuilding
Although the operating income of €4.801 billion was €2.280 billion more than the preceding year, which Orange said “was held back by the impairment of Romania” amounting to €789 million. CEO Christel Heydemann described the conditions there as “difficult” with “tough competition”. Orange is in the midst of merging its opco there with TKR to create a convergent operation and is looking forward to reaping benefit from the transaction, she said.
Marie-Noelle Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, Deputy CEO, Europe, noted that Orange is in discussions with utilities and the regulator in Romania regarding access to “a more open fibre network from some competitors”.
eCapEx was down by 0.7% to less than €7.4 billion as the fibre build-out in France has passed its peak, in line with the guidance and Heydemann said Orange had deployed more fibre than the next five biggest fibre layers in Europe.
Last, but by no means least, organic cash flow from telecom activities grew strongly to €3.058 billion, up by 24.7% on an historical basis thereby achieving the target of “at least €2.9 billion”. Liquidity is a wonderful thing and, what’s more, the net debt ratio for telecom activities was 1.93 in line with the medium term target of about 2, but up from the previous year’s 1.91.
New strategy stresses execution and the value of core telco assets and attributes
The refrain of My Back Pages, recorded by Bob Dylan in 1964 is:
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.
The song acknowledges his more naïve, younger self thought he had all the answers, but things are more complicated than he had realised. Now some disillusionment is accompanied by an understanding that we have to look at things as they truly are – l’actualité – rather than as we’d like them to be.
At Thursday’s Capital Markets Day the Orange group’s incumbent CEO Christel Heydemann and her team reset the Engage2025 strategy laid out by her predecessor, Stéphane Richard, in December 2019 on the eve of the COVID pandemic. The new strategy, Lead the future, covers the period to 2025 and is the foundation for what will be achieved up to 2030.
She said, “When I joined the company, my first reaction was that we cannot leave this business which is so essential for the future, for resilience, for strategic independence. How come we have an entire industry that has tried to diversify to find growth? There’s something wrong in the model. That’s why we have to make sure that we create value from…next-generation infrastructure” while keeping control of strategic assets, like Orange’s Totem towerco, for instance.
The rejuvenation includes decommissioning 2G and 3G networks and closing down its copper local loop in France at least by 2030. This Heydemann said is due to Orange’s foresight in building fibre out way ahead of most of its counterparts in the other large European economies, before the impetus of the pandemic.
Orange met all its guidance in Q4 and for the full fiscal year which is no mean achievement in what everyone is calling “significant headwinds”, but like all major European operator groups – and many other service providers around the world – it remains mired in debt while grand plans to fuel anything beyond incremental growth have floundered.
In Orange’s case, the debt from its telecoms activities stands at €25,298 billion for fiscal year 2022, up from €24,269 for fiscal year 2021, and at a ratio of 1.93 financial debt to EBITDAaL of telecom activities, up from a ratio of 1.91 in 2021.
Central conundrum
The fundamental issue of where the money is going to come from to change this remains unsolved.
Whereas Richard was looking for the main engines of growth to be other than established telco services, in Heydemann’s view, the updated versions enabled by next-generation infrastructure are whereOrange’s future lies. Hence during her 10 months in the job, Heydemann has started shedding non-core activities: Orange started negotiating the sale of video content firms OCS and Orange Studio and is looking at all options for its loss-making Orange Bank, including selling it. Heydemann’s only mention of it at Capital Markets Day was that she expected it to break even in 2025-2026.
There are four pillars to the new strategy:
• maintaining fundamental good business practices;
• creating value and profiting from investments in fibre and 5G networks;
• maintaining the relatively high growth rates Orange has achieved in its African and the Middle Eastern markets for the last few years; and
• Orange Business Services, which henceforth will be known as Orange Business.
Business in the driving seat?
Orange Business was also seen as a major driver of Orange group’s fortunes by Richard, but is somewhat adrift. Fixing it falls largely to Aliette Mousnier-Lompré who became CEO of Orange Business Services in January. She has worked at Orange for almost six and a half years, most recently as SVP Customer Services & Operations before her promotion.
Mousnier-Lompré said dropping the Services from the unit’s title represented “the simplification and the focus we want to achieve”. Under the previous regime, the goal was for Orange Business Services to become an integrator, offering ICT to businesses as well as connectivity. It has achieved its target. Digital capabilities, she said, had accounted for 29% of Orange Business Services’ activities in 2015 and now are at 44%. This is not cause for rejoicing, however.
The consequent “operational execution challenges” translated into a 32% EBITDA decline over three years, Mousnier-Lompré pointed out. Note again that stress on execution. She explained, “This change in activity mix has not only very seriously impacted our gross margin mix, it has also converted Orange Business into a kind of hybrid object: half telco, half digital company”.
Hence the situation “calls for a decisive overhaul of the Orange Business operating model,” she added. Now here’s the real heart of the matter, from BT Global (it too dropped the Services) and BT Enterprise, to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems, telecos’ track record at providing ICT services to businesses has not been far from a roaring success so far.
Will the strategy cut it?
Mousnier-Lompré’s solution is to massively simplify the product portfolio, chop the management team down from 17 to 12 members and introduce some new blood from outside, make “ambitious” savings and reskilling and upskilling more than 5,000 staff – although the consultation with “social partners” also known as trades unions will start next month.
Cyberdefence will play a big role in the rejuvenated Orange Business with a revenue target of €1.3 billion for 2025.
Mousnier-Lompré stated, “We aim at being a leading and high-performing network and digital integrator. We clearly have the assets to do so, and we will adapt our operating model and cost structure accordingly. It will be done through a structured action plan on which we regularly report progress.”
That doesn’t look like a new business model so much as shuffling some admittedly substantial cards. We will watch with interest.
NEC Corporation and partners A10 Networks, Adtran, Fortinet and Juniper Networks have launched the Value Added xHaul Solution Suite to help mobile operators’ merchandise their transport networks in the 5G era. The system will make them more bankable propositions while supplementing their traditional IP and optical transport system with datacentres, security and automation.
“We are helping to resolve operators’ pressing challenges in an end-to-end optimised approach,” said Hideyuki Ogata, General Manager, Service Provider Solutions Department, NEC Corporation. Our new xHaul system gives them simplicity, quality and profitability.”
This cultivation of the soil of the ecosystem is needed because during the transition to 5G xHaul, the backbone of the entire network, needs to adapt as the industry changes, said an NEC release. Open RAN might make for flexible networking, edge computing and network slicing but those resources can’t be exploited without operational simplicity and vigilant security. These reassuring properties can be created through multi-domain automation, which is complicated, but NEC and co promise to make it look simple. And they have to.
The xHaul network evolution will not be televised, but there will be a great deal of online meetings, since NEC said it takes a unique holistic best-of-breed approach to move beyond the siloed proposition prevalent in the industry today. This collaborative approach improves efficiency and Return on Investment (ROI), enabling the optimization of the entire transport network.
Since it is a global system integrator with IT and network engineering expertise, NEC is confident it can deliver a single xHaul suite that tailors its systems for operators to bring out their value.
The new Value Added xHaul Solution Suite is engineered by NEC’s 5G Transport Centers of Excellence (CoEs). NEC said its central hubs meet regional and local operators’ needs while ensuring the high performance of networks.
“This is an initiative based on strong relationships, close collaboration and a shared commitment to open and flexible systems,” said Stephan Neidlinger, VP of Global Business Development at Adtran.
UK flagship telco BT has gone live with its IoT National Roaming SIMs scheme, which aims to create continuity of coverage for businesses by letting their devices hop on any available network as they traverse the country. As BT explained in a release, the IoT national roaming SIMs will allow smart devices to connect to mobile networks, ensuring they stay connected while on the move or in remote locations. BT’s IoT national roaming SIMs will connect devices to BT-owned EE as a primary connection but the SIM can connect to multiple other major UK networks, helping to keep smart devices online.
The rollout of BT’s new service is set to benefit courier and delivery companies in particular by giving them reliable, fast network access no matter where they are – whether in cities, rural areas, or by the coast. Last week EE announced the arrival of 5G to 500 new, predominantly rural locations, bringing the total number of UK cities, towns and villages where customers can access the service to over 1,000. Meanwhile EE’s 4G network coverage is on track to reach 90% of the UK’s geographic landmass by 2025.
The new IoT service will help end users such as drivers and delivery workers improve accuracy and efficiency by giving them access to important information in real-time. An example of this would be providing visibility of fuel efficiency, changes to a delivery schedule and cold chain management so temperatures can be constantly monitored on a refrigerated vehicle. BT said it’s offering the product at the same price as its existing pay-as-you-use IoT SIM service, so businesses only pay for the data they use rather than risking underutilising data on a fixed rate.
“Businesses across the UK are increasingly using IoT devices to run operations,” said Marc Overton, MD of Division X at BT, “we’re making sure those connections stay strong no matter where business takes you.”
