2023.01.13 – Open Broadband News

Canal+ Group signs MOU to take control of Orange TV assets

Orange and the Canal+ Group has announced a memorandum of understanding that anticipates the acquisition by Canal+ of all capital held by Orange in the OCS pay TV package and in Orange Studio, the film and series co-production subsidiary.

Canal+, which is already a 33.34% shareholder in OCS, will become sole shareholder of the companies after this transaction. The deal is now being presented to employee representative bodies and the French Competition Authority.

Chile tops Ookla’s global fixed broadband ranking

The latest edition of analysis house Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index, which covers the period from November 2021 to November 2022, shows which countries have the fastest median fixed and mobile broadband speeds, with Chile and Qatar taking the respective download-speed crowns.

The new report shows that, globally, median mobile download speeds increased by 17% to 33.97Mbit/s, whilst median fixed broadband speeds shot up by an impressive 28% to 74.54Mbit/s. Those are good results by anybody’s reckoning, but upload speeds also showed pronounced improvement, with median mobile upload speeds increasing by 9% to 9.34Mbit/s and median fixed broadband upload speeds rising by 30% to 31.75Mbit/s.

Interestingly, latency, which has become the trendy new metric de nos jours, improved only slightly from the 29 milliseconds (ms) reported in 2021 to 28ms last year in the mobile sector, while median fixed broadband latency remained constant at 10ms.

As the chart above shows, Chile had the world’s fastest fixed broadband download speed, with a median speed of 216.46Mbit/s (having been second in the ranking the previous year).

UK homes to get better access to gigabit broadband

The UK government has brought into force new laws to allow new homes in England to be built with gigabit broadband connections and to allow telecoms firms to get faster broadband to nine million people living in blocks of flats.

The legislation is designed to address what is seen as a gating factor that could hinder the UK government’s plans to see 85% of the UK able to access gigabit fixed broadband by 2025. To date tenants living in the UK’s estimated 480,000 blocks of flats and apartments (multi-dwelling units, MDUs) have had to wait for a landlord’s permission to have a broadband operator enter their building to install a faster connection.

Such access rights are essential for the delivery of broadband upgrades as operators are unable to deploy their services without first obtaining permission, either from the landowner or a court, to install their equipment. Indeed, broadband companies have said that around two-fifths of their requests for access to install connections receive no response. Now, providers in England and Wales will be able to seek rights to access a property or shared land if the person required to grant access is unresponsive.

Edge computing key for rapid Industry 4.0 adoption

As the world recovers from the pandemic, the global internet of things (IoT) market is anticipated to surpass $1tn in revenue in 2024. Enterprise IoT could account for over 70% of the market share, according to a study from data and analytics company GlobalData, which identifies edge computing as holding a promise to no less than “dramatically” improve data processing for mission-critical applications and accelerate the adoption of Industry 4.0

In its report, Scaling at the edge: How edge computing is augmenting data processing, the analyst highlights how edge computing is improving data processing in various sectors across the technology’s value chain.

“Edge computing technology is the missing link of IoT as it processes data at the network edge instead of sending it back to the cloud or a datacentre, thus reducing the latency issue for businesses related to their internet and networking infrastructure impacted by the growing number of devices and data,” said Kiran Raj, practice head of disruptive tech at GlobalData.

Home entertainment dominated by digital revenue

Total revenue from digital entertainment was £10,950.4 million versus £988 million for physical in 2022, according to The Digital Entertainment and Retail Association ERA.

With digital content comprising all but 9% of the market, ThinkBroadband advised that it is clear that the public is embracing the ease that access digital content gives you.

“Despite pandemic, political uncertainty and recession, entertainment has continued to soar. Growth of nearly 40% since 2019 is extraordinary. Few would have believed we would retain the huge bounce in revenues seen when the Covid lockdown kept people at home, but these numbers show that even amid recession, people are determined to maintain their spending on entertainment. This is a huge vote of confidence in the attractiveness of our member’s offer whether they be small independent record shops or global streaming platforms,” said ERA Chairman Ben Drury.