Networking

Celona founders, from left, Rajeev Shah, CEO, Ravi Mulam, founding engineer, Vinay Anneboina, founding engineer, and Mehmet Yavuz, CTO. 
Celona
The common conception of 5G wireless service is as a faster radio connection for laptops and smartphones, multiple gigabits over the air. But you may need to revise most everything you think about 5G to understand its true significance.  For enterprises, which are increasingly interested in using 5G indoors, as a networking technology, one of the most important aspects of 5G is that it is about structuring the network for defined service in a way that could never be done before. That aspect of the matter, which is largely about software, means that 5G is much more than a radio upgrade.  It could, in fact, bring significant change to the way that software runs networking for corporate LANs. “Nokia and Ericsson and Cisco are in the middle of an interesting transition,” said Özer Dondurmacioğlu, who is vice president of technical marketing for two-year-old startup Celona, in an interview with ZDNet via Zoom. “For them, transitioning to 5G feels just like a radio transition, but the software architecture is completely changing,” says Dondurmacioğlu. “They are in the middle of this big, invisible software architecture revolution.” That software revolution is how Celona expects to make an end-run around Cisco and others. The startup is a young contender in a broad movement to bring 5G to enterprises as a supplement to, and sometimes a replacement for, WiFi-based wireless LANs. Celona has received $40 million in venture capital financing from top funds, including Lightspeed, Norwest, In-Q-Tel, Cervin Ventures, the venture capital arm of wireless chip giant Qualcomm, and the venture capital arm of Japan’s giant telco NTT. 

A Series B round of funding last year brought in $30 million in one fell swoop. Also: Dish makes deals with Equinix, Cisco to build out 5G network Celona started selling equipment a year ago. The Cupertino California-based company this past year opened a small engineering facility in Bangalore. The company employs 85 people in total at the moment.  What is key for Celona is that rather than sell telco software, it is offering software with an enterprise focus, software meant to be used by CIOs and sys admins. The company views itself as righting the wrongs of both WiFi wireless LANs as well as traditional private networks built on cellular spectrum. “The private LTE market has been around for a while,” Dondurmacioğlu observed, “and they have been doing one thing quite wrong.” Those traditional parties have tried to “just sell their existing infrastructure” to enterprise with no accommodation for how enterprises run.  To Dondurmacioğlu, who is of Turkish descent, that is the equivalent of “putting some yogurt on a burger” rather than creating “proper Mediterranean food.” Dondurmacioğlu, and Celona’s chief technologist, Mehmet Yavuz, who took part in the same interview via Zoom, are veterans of the enterprise LAN and telco domains. Dondurmacioğlu was a vice president with Aruba, the wireless LAN unit of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, for fourteen years. Yavuz, who started his career at telco equipment giant Nortel, was vice president of engineering at Qualcomm for almost fifteen years. Celona’s CEO, Rajeev Shah, was also an Aruba exec for eleven years.  Both Dondurmacioğlu and Yavuz see what WiFi and what private cellular each failed to achieve. While improving the corporate wireless LAN, Celona’s technology aims to fulfill the premise of private cellular, namely, more selective control of the network, the same way that a carrier is able to structure their wide-area network for quality of service. Celona’s 5G access points.
Celona
Also: 6 things businesses can do right now to leverage 5G “It’s just designed to equate to WLAN,” said Yavuz of the company’s 5G LAN. “There is LAN, there is WLAN, which is WiFi, and there is 5G LAN, and they are all part of the enterprise LAN family.”  Switch equipment from Celona will use 5G frequencies below 6 gigahertz, a part of the so-called S Band of spectrum that is licensed by the FCC for broad commercial use, known as the CBRS, or Citizens Broadband Radio System.  With Celona’s access points, companies can carefully structure their networks so that individual network services will have a kind of guaranteed private lane to operate with quality of service assurances. The switch registers with what’s known as a spectrum access system, or SAS, a cloud-based server that manages access to the spectrum by CBRS client devices.  The SAS server is a hosted service provided by Google and others including Arlington, Virginia-based cloud provider Federated Wireless. Celona management console.
Celona
Prior to operation, the SAS service has to be certified by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Celona ships its products bundled with a SAS license from either Google or Federated. When the products are installed, a Celona network then requests authorization from the SAS service for private spectrum access for all the access points. As a result of the SAS approach, the cellular frequencies of CBRS, like cellular networks generally, have freedom from interference that was never assured with wireless LANs using WiFi.  “I worked on some pretty interesting WiFi deployments at Aruba,” recalled Dondurmacioğlu. “I always had to contend with interference from my neighbor networks, and from within the network itself,” he said. “I would deploy 28 devices in a hospital, I had to make sure they don’t interfere with each other through some terrible channel planning, and then that my neighbors don’t interfere with me.” Also: 5G’s biggest benefits will arrive where you’d least expect them “I don’t have that problem with cellular — by design,” he said. Cellular schedules all traffic flows between all devices on the network. “The concept of radios stepping over each other is gone.” Not only is interference banished by the SAS, but the QOS for every service is rigorously enforced with cellular. What that means, and what is lost in the many press releases from Cisco and Dish and others, is that 5G is not just about speed, a faster radio. More important than speed, 5G is about latency, the longest delay in sending a bit of data from point A to point B. In his Aruba projects, “We never were able to guarantee a service level,” Dondurmacioğlu recalled. “I could say that this video traffic goes before this data traffic,” but he could not guarantee a certain number of megabits would be actually given to the video stream. That kind of allocation of bits is, again, by design available in cellular. When Celona talks to enterprises about lack of interference and about rigorous QOS, “They go, yeah, we were never able to do that,” he said, “and they want to talk about how they can start doing that.” CBRS is just one band at the moment, approximately 3.5 gigahertz to 3.7 gigahertz. The 150 megahertz of spectrum afforded in that band is more than enough to cover the needs of most corporate offices, said Yavuz.  “I worked on some pretty interesting WiFi deployments at Aruba,” Özer Dondurmacioğlu, Celona’s vice president of technical marketing, recalls. “I always had to contend with interference from my neighbor networks […] We never were able to guarantee a service level […] I don’t have that problem with cellular — by design.”
Celona
“The way we look at it is, sub-6 [gigahertz] is a really solid solution in enterprise for both indoor and outdoor coverage,” said Yavuz. “It can cover a large range.”  Also: 5G isn’t quite there, and MixComm believes it has the millimeter wave fix For specific use cases, said Yavuz, one can supplement S Band with higher-frequency millimeter wave technology, an area of the electromagnetic spectrum that some believe will be very important for 5G over time.  As much as cellular transforms wireless LAN, on the flip side, Celona believes it can be enterprise-friendly in ways telcos never could with LTE. Yavuz spent years at Qualcomm working with the carriers. “My passion was to bring that cellular technology to enterprise” when he ran the so-called small cells effort at Qualcomm, Yavuz recalled. “From the hardware perspective, Qualcomm did a lot of work to make SoCs [systems on chip] to make that base station into a small cell.” He observed the intransigence of an entrenched industry that couldn’t adapt its ways. “We worked really hard with cellular operators to get them to embrace” small cells. “We said, There’s hundreds of billions of square feet of enterprises, worldwide, why don’t you use this solution to bring cellular inside the enterprises.” Instead, the telcos used the technology as a backhaul offering, to carry traffic from the campus back to the carrier’s core network. The result was “a distributed antenna system that was totally separate from enterprise,” explained Yavuz. “They sent their own field engineers, with their own firewalls and cabling, and before you knew it, enterprises said, Am I going to have one from Verizon, and one from AT&T, and one from Sprint? This doesn’t work.” Also: DISH partners with IBM for new cloud-native 5G network Qualcomm cooperated with the network operators’ byzantine processes of document writing and approvals, to little avail. “After years and years of trying, I just gave up,” said Yavuz. That’s when Yavuz began talking with Celona co-founder Shah, musing about a new kind of venture. Instead of sell the same old stuff, Celona started life two years ago with a “new software architecture from scratch” to run 5G access points that it sells to smoothly plug into corporate LANs. That means the technology uses existing DHCP servers and firewalls and policies. “When we talk to CIOs, they just get it,” said Yavuz. “They see, Oh, I can incorporate this into my network, I know how to manage it, I know how to connect my devices, and it becomes part of my solution, instead of a shadow solution, yet another network.”  “That’s how we really differentiate ourselves.” The applications of enterprise 5G will be things such as robotics systems, and video feeds from numerous cameras, the kinds of applications that can benefit from low latency and guaranteed quality of service.  “Many of these applications are driven by the enterprise verticals,” said Yavuz.  Also: Verizon and Microsoft team up to offer 5G edge cloud computing for businesses “We were surprised,” said Dondurmacioğlu. “We thought we would start with projects where the iPhone was the client device, and we do see those sorts of things, but now we are in the middle of supporting automated, guided vehicles in outdoor spaces in a mining site, to robots in a warehouse.” Those vertical-market applications ultimately need greater software smarts, said Dondurmacioğlu, given that they involve technology from multiple vendors that may be customized to an enterprise operation. “Two different factories in the same city might be using two different robotics technologies, and they have different underlying traffic flows” in the pattern of wireless traffic. Enterprise engineers, versed in Cisco network operations, for example, understand that, said Dondurmacioğlu.    As much as Celona lies outside the fold of traditional telecom and private cellular offerings, the company has been nimble in finding partners to use its technology. It has a partnership with Aruba at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. NTT, which has a North American operation for managed network services, is using the Celona equipment, as is SBA Communications. Large customers include the St. Luke’s Hospital complex of Boise, Idaho. The company has 35 customers in all. “I think it would be nice to have more validation of our approach” from carriers to go after enterprise. “Our message to them is, Hey, you can actually go after a very sizable market opportunity here, and very fast, if use an architecture that serves them, rather than the same old garbage from the past.” Conversations with carriers are ongoing, he said.  As for the traditional network suppliers, they will be challenged by the continuing software revolution, said Dondurmacioğlu.  5G is not only about latency and rigorous QOS, he said, it is about the entire move of infrastructure to cloud technologies. “4G required certain network functions, and 5G comes in and says, change all of that, make it more like cloud software,” said Dondurmacioğlu. “Put your network functions into containers, and micro-services.” “The software architecture is completely changing,” he said. For Cisco and other traditional vendors, that means “hundreds more people trained, a lot of software re-written, support upgraded,” and many more variables. Cisco and fellow legacy vendors talk about having multiple antennas, but “you ask them about the software, they’re not as forthcoming.” If the value proposition of those traditional vendors is “just add a lot more radios,” without software innovation, “I wonder if they will have an easy time as much as we will in that transition,” he said. More

Cisco Systems announced its FY22 Q1 earnings this week. ZDNet posted this story covering the report, but as is often the case, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. On the surface, Cisco reported what would be considered by most analysts to be in-line first-quarter numbers, because the company’s revenues were at the midpoint of its guidance and a shade below consensus estimates. Revenue growth remained steady, up 8% year-over-year, which was certainly positive. Second-quarter guidance was also slightly below expectations as the company indicated revenue growth of 5% to 7%. 

One might look at the quarterly results and see a company that’s struggling to meet its own targets, but as mentioned previously, the numbers can be misleading — particularly in this current macro environment. Here are the most important points gleaned from Cisco’s quarterly report:Cisco’s business has never been stronger. Despite the “meh” revenue numbers, Cisco’s business is stronger than ever. It is being held back by ongoing component shortages. Although revenue was up only 8%, order growth hit a decade-high record of 33%, up from 31% last quarter, meaning growth is accelerating. Other indicators are that annual recurring revenue (ARR) was $21.6 billion, up 10% year-over-year, and remaining performance obligations are now $30.1 billion, also up 10%. During the Q&A section of the call, CEO Chuck Robbins said: “With that RPO and the backlog that we have, the stuff (Cisco products) is going to ship. Short term, this doesn’t feel great. What we are seeing is that the customers are making decisions right now to choose our technology across the board,” indicating that Cisco’s portfolio approach is working but the component shortage is holding the company up. One more note: Cisco, despite the lower guide, did reiterate full-year guidance, indicating the back half of the year should make up for the current slight miss. A margin rebound is coming. One of the metrics that investors watch is Cisco’s margins. Gross margin this quarter was 64.5%, down 130 basis points from a year ago. It’s important to note that a 64.5% gross margin is remarkable, particularly for a company that sells products that experts said would be commoditized by now. But the fact is margins are lower, which could indicate increased competitiveness or price pressure. The reality is that Cisco has been overpaying for components, delivery, shipping, and anything else it can do to get products into its customers’ hands faster, and this has acted as a drag on margins. The company did announce it had raised prices to offset the higher costs, and customers seemed to be fine with this as they understand the current challenges. CFO Scott Herren explained that it takes a few quarters for the higher prices to make their way through the channel and procurement processes, and he indicated margins will return to normal in a couple of quarters.  Cisco has revamped its webscale business. Cisco has long been known as the 800-pound gorilla and de facto standard in networking for companies of all sizes. The one exception was webscale. In that industry, Cisco was not just a laggard but for years, not even a serious contender for the business.  A few years ago, Cisco got closer to the cloud giants by working with them to develop products, rather than assuming it knew what they wanted and developing apps without them. In a relatively short time — just a couple of years — it has turned this business around; this quarter its webscale business grew by 200%. Cisco’s differentiation in this space is in its Silicon One chips. The 11th processor in this family, the P100 chip, is capable of routing at 19.2 TB. Their custom-versus-merchant silicon debate has been an ongoing one, but Cisco has always obtained a performance advantage because it can customize a chip to a specific use case versus merchant silicon that’s more general-purpose. Its product revenue in this area was up over $1 billion year-over-year, showing Cisco’s strength in this area. Cisco is a massive software company. The company is best known for its market-leading hardware, but Cisco ranks among the biggest software companies in the world. This quarter, it delivered a whopping $3.7 billion, with 80% sold as subscriptionware. This annualizes to almost $15 billion in software revenue. At that number, Cisco is the fourth-largest software company in the world, ranking just ahead of Adobe. Software revenue comes from every part of Cisco’s business, including networking, collaboration, security, application performance, and data center. Expect Cisco to continue to push more innovation into software in the future.  Work to be done in security. Cisco’s security business was up 4% year over year and given the size of this business, that’s a healthy number. Looking back though, Cisco’s security business had a growth number of 18% in 2019, which declined to 12%, then 7%, and now 4%, indicating a deceleration of the business. Meanwhile, the security pure-play companies have been seen growth in the teens — and even 20% — range. This is partially explained by the shift in the business, because the traditionally purchased perpetual products are in decline, acting as a headwind for growth. The subscription-based business from products such as zero-trust and unified threat management grew a healthy 15%, so there’s a careful balancing act Cisco has been doing. Also, some of its security hardware products have been affected by the component shortage, which also has an impact. This partially explains the deceleration, but the reality is that the security industry is tending to a platform purchase model. In today’s network-centric world, Cisco’s dominant share in networking should enable it to dominate security — perhaps not as it does in networking, but in that ballpark. The business is transitioning to software, which is certainly impacting the company, and Cisco does have some work to do here. Robbins will make sure the work gets done. More

The orange is shrinking
Image: ACCC
The latest edition of the NBN Wholesale Market Indicators Report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has revealed the number of connections on NBN’s 250/25Mbps Superfast and 500-1000Mbps/50Mbps Ultrafast plans has dropped by nearly 200,000 lines. Combined with users continuing to leave 12Mbps and 25Mbps plans, it has left 58% of the network now on 50Mbps plans. Over the September quarter, almost 45,000 lines moved off 12Mbps plans leaving 924,000 connections, 122,000 moved off 25Mbps with 945,000 now on that speed, 171,000 lines switched from Superfast leaving 389,000 active connections, and 24,700 dropped Ultrafast tiers for under 62,000 to remain. Almost 353,000 lines shifted to 50Mbps with the total number now at 4.9 million, and over 50,000 took up 100/20Mbps plans taking the total to over 423,000. These shifts are sometimes instigated by users, but often times it can be the telcos purchasing cheaper bandwidth at higher tiers and “gifting” speed increases to customers. In the December quarter, for instance, TPG Telecom had 468,000 fewer connections on 100Mbps speed plans, but it saw an extra 335,000 lines move onto 250Mbps, and 113,000 extra 50Mbps plans. For this quarter, the telco had 282,000 fewer 250Mbps connections, 43,000 fewer Ultrafast lines, and 292,500 more 50Mbps connections and almost 63,900 100/40Mbps lines. “The 50Mbps and 100Mbps speed tiers have been very popular with consumers recently, which is understandable as extended lockdowns in several states and territories have resulted in millions of people working and learning from home,” ACCC commissioner Anna Brakey said.

“As temporary promotions wind down and retailers adjust pricing accordingly, we strongly encourage customers to think about their internet needs and pay for a higher speed tier only if their usage demands it.” Fresh off its Exetel acquisition, Superloop has made its first entrance into the report, breaking through to be called out on its own, rather than bundled into others. Sitting around 1.5% market share with approximately 126,700 customers, Superloop has between 33,300 and 36,900 customers each on full fibre, fibre to the node, and cable technologies. “Smaller niche providers have injected competition into the market for broadband services and they now go some way to constraining the big four of Telstra, TPG, Optus, and Vocus,” Brakey added. “Smaller providers give consumers real choice in the service quality and range of products to meet their needs.” As a result of Exetel joining Superloop, the ACCC said Optus saw its wholesale market share drop by 1.1%. Overall CVC capacity across the NBN network now sits at 2.82Mbps per user. Related Coverage More

Shares of Cisco were down on Wednesday, after the company published mixed first quarter financial results. Sales were up across Cisco’s newly-organized product categories, except for “hybrid work” products, which faced tough year-over-year comparisons. Total product order growth in Q1 was up 33% year-over-year, while product revenue was up 11%Cisco’s Q1 non-GAAP earnings per share came to 82 cents on revenue of $12.9 billion, up 8% year-over-year. Wall Street was expecting first-quarter earnings of 80 cents per share on revenue of $12.98 billion.”In Q1, we had robust growth and continued strong demand despite the very dynamic supply environment,” CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. “Cisco’s technology sits at the heart of the accelerated digital transformation happening today. Our breakthrough innovation, strong demand, and the success of our business transformation position us well for another year of growth in fiscal 2022.”On a conference call, Robbins elaborated on the impacts of ongoing supply chain constraints.”We are constrained in what we can build and ship to our customers,” he said. We have a world-class supply chain team that works to deliver an incredibly high volume of products given our scale and reach. They continue to execute well in this highly fluid and complex environment.”

The company is taking steps to mitigate the supply shortages, he said, such as working closely with key suppliers and contract manufacturers, paying significantly higher logistics costs, modifying designs and optimizing build and delivery plans. “We are doing this at a breadth and scale that is significantly greater than most in our industry,” Robbins continued. “Of course, all of these steps, while necessary to maximize our production and delivery to customers, add to our cost structure. When combined with cost increases we are seeing from many of our suppliers, these factors are putting pressure on our gross margins. While we thoughtfully raised prices to offset this impact, the benefits are not immediate and will be recognized over the coming quarters.”Cisco’s non-GAAP operating margin in Q1 was 33.3%. Product revenue in the first quarter was up 11% year-over-year, totaling $9.53 billion. Effective for the first quarter of fiscal 2022, Cisco began reporting revenue in the following categories: Secure, Agile Networks; Hybrid Work; End-to-End Security; Internet for the Future; Optimized Application Experiences; Other Products and Services. The change reflects remarks from Robbins, who said at Cisco’s 2021 Investor Day that the future of the business would stand on six technology areas: secure, agile networks; hybrid work; security; internet for the future; optimized application experiences; and capabilities at the edge.For Q1, product revenue was led by sales in Secure, Agile Networks, which was up 10% to $5.97 billion. “Internet for the Future” revenue was up 46% to $1.37 billion. End-to-End Security revenue was up 4% to $895 million. Optimized Application Experiences was up 18% to $181 million. Hybrid Work was down 7% to $1.11 billion. Other product revenue was up 9% to $3 million. Service revenue in Q1 was up 1% year-over-year, reaching $3.37 billion. Deferred revenue in Q1 was $22.1 billion, up 8% in total, with deferred product revenue up 19%. Deferred service revenue was flat.For the second quarter, Cisco expects revenue growth of 4.5% to 6.5% year-over-year.

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The Australian Labor Party has said that should it win government at the next election, it would be spending AU$2.4 billion to extend the existing NBN fibre to the node (FttN) upgrade plan to a further 1.5 million premises. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese told the ABC that 660,000 of that number would be in regional Australia. “It will cost AU$2.4 billion. That will be provided for the National Broadband Network. This is an investment. It’s an investment that will produce a return. It’s an investment in our future. And it’s an investment in equity as well,” he said. “Why is it that some communities and some places are just missing out? I can’t, from my office in Marrickville, I can’t upload and film from there through the NBN system, because it just isn’t up to the task. But in regional Australia, it’s worse.” Albanese said the commitment would see 90% of the fixed footprint able to have access gigabit speeds by 2025, and create 12,000 jobs. “We know that we have a big technological repair job as a result of the negative policies of this government, who, when they came to office, of course, said that high-speed fibre was a waste,” he said. “They thought it was all about downloading videos. We know that it’s not.”

Labor also said it would be keeping the NBN in public hands to ensure there are “divides between haves and have nots”. “If you privatise the services, we don’t want to see what happened with Telstra, which was a privatisation that led to monopoly power, privatisation that required Labor, as part of our NBN policy, to introduce the structural separation that was necessary to introduce competition into the sector,” he added. In response, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher trotted out his well-worn trainwreck trope that Labor only connected 51,000 premises when in government, before striking on the nub of Labor’s announcement. “Nothing in what Labor is now proposing adds to our existing commitment before 2023; NBN is fully committed to delivering the existing upgrade,” he said. “At least Labor has now accepted the Coalition’s efficient model of fibre on demand — abandoning its previous signature policy of fibre to every premise, regardless of whether it is wanted or not.” Fletcher then asked for Labor to explain where the funding for its plan would come from, before deeming it to be “wasteful spending”. The government, of which Fletcher is a part, currently resides over the largest deficit in the nation’s history, but continues to look for more ways to shrink its taxation base. Telco analyst Paul Budde said, overall, Labor’s plan is a continuation of a decade’s muddling on the NBN. “It is not revolutionary, nothing dramatically different or extra from what the government is doing after it backflipped and started to upgrade FttN connection to full fibre. The AU$2.4 billion that they are putting on the table for it is in line with the sort of ongoing extra investments the government had to make over the last decade — amounting to AU$28 billion — so the extra AU$2.4 billion is not outside the ordinary,” he said. “A can-do strategy that slowly but surely will see Australia entering the leagues of countries with top quality broadband access.” Budde added that the poor fixed wireless connectivity in regional Australia still needed looking at, and the proliferation of services like Starlink in Australia could be the next stage in the NBN saga. Related Coverage More

Another day, another major internet outage. This time around, Google reported that it had experienced a global issue with its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) networking at 12:53 PM US Eastern time. The result? Many of us have seen 404 errors when trying to get to some of our favorite web pages, such as Spotify, Facebook, and ZDNet. Indeed, according to DownDectector, there appears to be more major sites having problems than not. According to internet managers on the Outages mailing list, the specific problem seems to be with the GCP load balancers. These, working with Google’s Cloud Delivery Network (CDN), provide high availability web servers. This is designed to stop website failures and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by putting your website behind a single anycast IP and then scaling your resources up or down with intelligent autoscaling. But, with a global problem, Google was unable to keep the sites up.While at times your website may come back up, since it’s only the load balancers and CDN that’s having trouble as this is written, 1:42 PM Eastern, Google is still reporting, “We do not have an ETA for full resolution at this point.”However, by 1:59 PM, Google stated, “The issue with Cloud Run has been resolved for all affected users.” Users, however, are still reporting some website outages. More

According to a survey of 294 UK estate agents, carried out by Omdia and commissioned by networking company Huawei, one in three said owners of houses with broadband speeds of at least 300Mbps could expect their homes to be valued at £5,000 more than if it didn’t have high-speed broadband. Broadband quality was considered by 20% of estate agents as the single most important factor to homebuyers, just behind the size of a property, which 23% of agents said was the key factor. Indeed, estate agents thought broadband was more important than the number of bedrooms, the age of a property, and access to transport. The relative importance of fast broadband may have gone up since the pandemic began almost two years ago, with people working, learning, meeting and viewing entertainment at home on the same network, often at the same time. “Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, 69% of agents have witnessed an increase in queries about the quality of the broadband connection at a property they are marketing,” said Huawei. Of agents that said an existing 300Mbps broadband added value to a property, 9% estimate such speeds would increase the value by over £10,000.Estate agents reported that they’d had more queries about the broadband quality since the pandemic began, most of which concerned the availability of full fibre connectivity. Some 90% of estate agents said their clients wanted properties with speeds over 100 Mbps, while 34% were looking for speeds above 300Mbps. 

The findings aren’t particularly surprising and line up with other parts of the world, including the US, that discovered the need for faster broadband during the pandemic.Quite a few homes in the UK do have at least 300 Mbps. As the BBC notes, recent Ofcom research puts that figure at 62% or roughly 18.2 million homes in the UK. Ofcom in December reported that 96% of homes had at least 30 Mbps speeds, but that only 60% of premises (or 11 million) had taken up this level of service. Perhaps attitudes have changed since then though after a year more of remote working.  The UK last year announced plans to bring gigabit speeds to all households by 2025 but later wound that back to 85% covered by 2025.  

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Basslink announced on Friday that it has entered into voluntary administration and appointed EY to oversee it. The company said the move was a result of ongoing disputes with Hydro Tasmania, and an unsuccessful sale. CEO Malcolm Eccles said administration was the “best way to effect change while protecting all stakeholders”. “Regrettably, against the backdrop of many issues and having exhausted options, Basslink needed to take proactive action to put Basslink in the best possible position to navigate forward through these challenges,” he said. “We know this is a challenging time for our small team and their wellbeing will continue to be at the front of our minds throughout the voluntary administration process.” Last month, the Tasmanian government kicked off legal action to have Basslink pay AU$70 million it was owed for outages that occurred to its Bass Strait cable in 2015 and 2016. In December 2020, the arbitrator between the government and Basslink said the December 2015 outage was not a force majeure event, and hit Basslink with AU$38.5 million in damages.

In March 2018, the Tasmanian government sought AU$122 million in compensation due to the Basslink cable to the mainland, which carries electricity and data, being down for six months. The outage began in December 2015, with Basslink finally completing its cable jointing repairs in June 2016 following months-long delays due to excess water damage and inclement weather. The outage lasted so long that the Tasmanian government got involved, with then-Minister for Information Technology and Innovation Michael Ferguson also reprimanding TPG for not buying additional capacity on Telstra’s alternate cables during the outage. Basslink and the government then engaged in a war of duelling reports, with the government-owned Hydro Tasmania saying the outage was caused by the operating limits of the cable being exceeded, while a Basslink report put forward dismissed the claim was a result of a force majeure event. “The Basslink Interconnector continues to operate efficiently and reliably, connecting Tasmania to the national electricity market. We continue to serve the communities of Tasmania and Victoria, providing a reliable and sustainable source of energy,” Eccles added on Friday. KPMG has been appointed as receivers and managers by Basslink’s lenders Previous Coverage More