Local authorities are able to bid for a share of a further £95million that has been released by the UK government towards full fibre rollout.

UK start-up operator, British Fibre Networks has started work on its first installation - a new build apartment block in North Wales for housebuilder, LW Group. The company says that it will begin further work shortly on developments in Cheshire and Liverpool.

More than 7,000 homes and businesses in Sunderland, the UK, will be next to access Virgin Media’s ultrafast broadband as the provider expands its network under the ‘Project Lightning’ programme, which aims to provide speeds up to 362Mb/s in the region.

Open Fiber has signed an agreement with a pool of commercial banks including Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the European Investment Bank (EIB), securing a €3.5 billion finance programme to aid the roll out of fibre to the home (FTTH) across Italy.

UK gigabit broadband provider, Hyperoptic has completed a debt raise of £250million from eight  international banks to extend its full fibre optic network to 50 towns and cities across the country by 2019.

The UK has fallen to 35^th place in the global broadband speed delivery rankings, compared with 31^st place in 2017. This is according to the latest data gathered and published by research group M-Lab and UK broadband comparison site Cable.co.uk.

The European Parliament and Council have reached a political agreement to update the European Electronic Communications Code. The proposed new version proposed is designed to boost investments in high capacity networks across the EU, including in remote and rural areas.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – GigabitNow, a division of IsoFusion, has received an equity investment in IsoFusion from Benaroya Companies.  The venture capital firm will also provide $14 million in project financing capital, which will allow GigabitNow to expand its operations. 

GigabitNow's new in-house financing capabilities will allow it to expedite its network construction financing for private communities and municipalities in the U.S. including the initial costs of network development.

Open Fiber is extending its collaboration with Vodafone for the development in Italy of ultra-wideband connectivity services for fibre to the home (FTTH).

The agreement, which is already active in around two million households and businesses across 13 cities has been expanded to an additional 258 cities as part of the next wave of the fast broadband network rollout. This includes Clusters A and B - home to around 60% of the Italian population.

Belgian telecommunications operator, Proximus has chosen the Viavi ONMSi optical network monitoring system to test and monitor its growing fibre to the home (FTTH) network at the build-out stage, in order to help maintain reliability.