UK communications regulator, Ofcom has decided not to introduce a restricted dark fibre remedy for the period up to March 2019. The regulator consulted on proposals to introduce a restricted dark fibre remedy for leased line services at and below 1Gb/s until March 2019 last November, following a judgment by the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

UK communications regulator, Ofcom has published a set of measures that aim to increase investment in full fibre broadband networks and lower the upfront building costs. The draft has been submitted to the European Commission for comment, and a final statement is due to be published in March 2018.

ADVA Optical Networking will host a joint demonstration with BT to showcase end-to-end, multi-layer transport network slicing and assurance.

One of the UK’s major construction companies, Carillion, has been forced to enter liquidation. The move comes following unsuccessful talks with potential lenders and government to try to rescue the business, which provides services to the defence, education, health and transport sectors. Alongside its partner telent, Carillion is also a supplier to two big name firms in building out broadband.

The UK government recently confirmed its commitment to delivering broadband speeds of at least 10Mb/s by 2020 to everyone, via a regulatory universal service obligation (USO).

BT and Huawei plan to establish a joint research group at the University of Cambridge with £25 million in funding and contributions over the next five years.

The collaboration will bring together ‘five to ten’ researchers – from BT Labs, the Huawei R&D Team and academics from the University of Cambridge – to explore new communications technologies that have the potential to unlock economic benefits for UK businesses and organisations.

BT has announced a £20 million investment to accelerate the expansion of its ultrafast broadband network to towns across Northern Ireland, reaching a further 140,000 premises.

The roll-out, which is scheduled to be completed by March 2019, will predominantly involve the deployment of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, the operator said.

Under current programmes, 25 per cent of homes and businesses in Northern Ireland are scheduled to have access to ultrafast broadband, defined as speeds of 100Mb/s and above, by this time.

Multinational service provider BT has deepened its relationship with optical transport supplier Ciena, by renewing a five-year contract to deploy the vendor’s 6500 converged packet optical platform.

Ciena has been a supplier to BT since 2005 when it became one of the preferred suppliers to the operator’s 21CN deployment, the mega-project to migrate BT’s entire customer base from the existing UK public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to an Internet Protocol (IP)-based network.

BT has made an offer to the UK government to voluntarily provide high-speed broadband to 99 per cent all homes and businesses across the country within five years, which would largely be delivered by Openreach.

The government said it received the offer after it committed to introduce a Universal Service Obligation (USO) through regulation to give every home and business in the UK the right to request a high-speed connection of at least 10Mb/s.