South African telco Telkom is arguing that an upcoming withdrawal of cellular spectrum would cause significant disruption as people are still forced to work from home, and the move would harm the provision of services for those users. Telkom has applied to the South African High Court in Pretoria and asking for a review of […]
South Africa’s telco Telkom is suing the broadcasting and communications regulator ICASA over the withdrawal of the temporary spectrum that’s coming to an end in November. The spectrum was made available in April 2020 to help cope with extra demand from home working and the pressures from Covid. The government extended the emergency spectrum access […]
South Africa suffers regular electricity load shedding, where local power supplies are cut during heavy demand. Now the country’s business leaders are arguing with regulator ICASA that much the same risks apply to spectrum bandwidth. Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) head Busi Mavuso said that if ICASA proceeds with its plan to take back temporarily […]
Italian public broadcaster RAI will discontinue DVB-T MPEG-2 broadcasts for nine of its thematic TV channels from October 20th. The change will affect Rai 4, Rai 5, Rai Movie, Rai Yoyo, Rai Sport+ HD, Rai Storia, Rai Gulp, Rai Premium and Rai Scuola, which will all switch to DVB-T MPEG-4 encoding. For the time being, […]
The UK government is extending the five national multiplex licences for the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) platform – better known as Freeview – until 2034. This will protect for the future the main way audiences currently enjoy a diverse range of digital TV channels for free. It will guarantee prime spectrum – the radio waves […]
European broadband operators providing Wi-Fi 6 gateways amount to 39 at the end of 2020, for 53 devices commercialised, as shown in Dataxis latest research focusing on broadband CPE key characteristics. Wi-Fi 6 is the latest Wi-Fi standard deployed by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The wireless networking standard enables a larger capacity and better use of […]
Charlie Ergen’s EchoStar team managed to avoid a humiliating forced ending of its plans for a global S-band service when a tiny satellite successfully “brought into use” a set of International Telecom Union (ITU) frequencies ahead of an August 10th ITU deadline. This was the ‘third time lucky’ for EchoStar given that two previous attempts […]
Another clutch of legal Motions were filed on August 2nd to Intelsat’s bankruptcy court by both parties in the bitter dispute between SES and Intelsat. Lawyers for Intelsat filed their Motion for the court to dismiss the SES demand for Summary Judgement in the SES claim, which – in essence – is demanding a 50/50 […]
US multiplay telco Verizon and Samsung Electronics have completed an end-to-end fully virtualised 5G data session over C-band spectrum in a live network environment. The new milestone was reached in preparation for Verizon’s upcoming 5G Ultra Wideband expansion using its newly-acquired C-band spectrum. “We have been driving the industry to large scale virtualisation using the […]
UK comms regulator Ofcom has published proposals to change the way it licenses certain satellite systems. A number of new satellite broadband networks are currently being developed, which use Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit (NGSO) systems to connect people to the Internet – particularly those in hard-to-reach areas. NGSO systems are more sophisticated than earlier satellite broadband […]