• AT&T preps faster FTTP build
• Altice France break-up talks intensify
• European firms call for AI Act pause

As the Independence Day holiday loomed in the US and in the wake of the passing of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act by Congress, AT&T issued a press release announcing it will “accelerate its fibre deployment plan” by adding an additional 1 million locations per year to its fibre-to-the-premises rollout plans  starting from 2026. That’s because the “pro-investment policies and tax provisions” enshrined in the new law will help AT&T, and other infrastructure builders, speed up their deployment plans. The US Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, eulogised the new Act thus: “The passage of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill has set the stage for the coming Golden Age as we prepare to celebrate the 250th year of our great nation.” Time will tell. An accompanying press release says the new law will “spur investment, maintain US leadership in innovation, and create economic opportunity nationwide”. AT&T noted: “Thanks to the policies in this legislation, AT&T expects to invest more rapidly in next-generation networks… increasing our investment by an additional 1 million fibre customer locations annually starting in 2026.” Three days ago AT&T was cringing as President Donald Trump publicly lambasted the telco for the technical fault that disrupted a conference call he was having with “faith leaders from all over the country.” Today, AT&T is in wide-eyed awe and appreciation of the president for the far-reaching beneficial effects the new Act will have on its fortunes, not only for its fixed broadband goals but for its mobile plans too. According to AT&T, the new law “creates a pipeline of midband spectrum that will help meet soaring consumer demand and keep the US technologically competitive with other countries. Paired with the tax provisions in the bill, this legislation paves the way for the stated goals laid out by FCC chairman Brendan Carr: Unleashing high-speed infrastructure builds and restoring America’s global lead in wireless technology through smart policy.” The telco says it will publish an update on the likely full impact that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will have on its 2025 and long-term financial outlook and capital allocation plans when it reports its second-quarter financials on 23 July. The AT&T announcement comes only weeks after the telco decided to splash $5.75bn on the fibre broadband assets of Lumen Technologies to advance its fixed broadband strategy. AT&T noted at the time that it “expects to reach approximately 60 million total fibre locations by the end of 2030 – roughly doubling where AT&T Fiber is available today.” At the end of March, AT&T’s fibre access network reached 29.5 million business and consumer locations (of which some 23.8 million were consumer premises), up from 27.1 million a year earlier.  

The billionaire telecom magnate Patrick Drahi, whose Altice empire is still weighed down by massive debt pile, is moving ahead with plans to break up and sell Altice France (also known by its brand name, SFR) to its domestic rivals Iliad (Free), Bouygues Telecom and Orange, according to BFM TV, the major French broadcaster that was sold by Drahi just over a year ago when he offloaded Altice Media to conglomerate CMA CGM for €1.55bn. Speculation emerged in May that SFR’s rivals were mulling over how they might split the troubled telco’s assets between them and, according to BFM TV, those discussions have intensified and now include SFR representatives. The report suggests that Altice France has been valued at €23bn (including €16bn of debt) and that if indeed the spoils are shared between the other three main French telcos, Bouygues would get the lion’s share of the mobile network infrastructure (because it already has a radio access network infrastructure sharing deal with Altice) and would also likely be favoured to take Altice’s fixed broadband subscribers as it is currently lagging behind its rivals in this part of the market.  

Dozens of European firms have signed an open letter to the European Commission asking it to pause the implementation of its AI Act because of the fear the region’s prospects will be harmed by conflicting and unhelpful regulation. The letter, entitled Stop the Clock and addressed to EC president Ursula von der Layen, was published late on 3 July and notes that “Europe has long distinguished itself by its ability to strike a careful balance between regulation and innovation. This approach is widely recognised around the world as a cornerstone of the ‘European model’. It is particularly important in the context of artificial intelligence (AI), whose impact, as a transformative technology, reaches far beyond the tech sector. Like the industrial revolutions brought about by steam power or the internet, AI will redefine entire economic domains – from energy and manufacturing to life sciences and defence. At a time of unprecedented technological, economic and geopolitical change, Europe’s ability to lead in AI innovation and adoption will be critical to meet the competitiveness and sovereignty challenges so clearly identified by Mario Draghi – especially in our most established and strategic industries. Unfortunately, this balance is currently being disrupted by unclear, overlapping and increasingly complex EU regulations. This puts Europe’s AI ambitions at risk, as it jeopardises not only the development of European champions but also the ability of all industries to deploy AI at the scale required by global competition.” The signatories say they “welcome the Commission’s AI Continent Action Plan and your stated commitment to regulatory simplification. But ambition must now translate into action. The upcoming digital omnibus package and the digital fitness check must reflect a decisive pivot toward a more proportionate, innovation-friendly regulatory approach. These simplification efforts should benefit SMEs, startups, scaleups and large established companies alike, who will all contribute to driving innovation if they can take advantage of clear and predictable rules.” They added: “We welcome recent discussions considering the need to postpone the enforcement of the AI Act as relevant guidelines and standards continue to be developed, and as various industries work together to find solutions that work for everyone. To address the uncertainty this situation is creating, we urge the Commission to propose a two-year ‘clock-stop’ on the AI Act before key obligations enter into force, in order to allow both for reasonable implementation by companies, and for further simplification of the new rules.” The move is important as European organisations, including telcos, are about to embark on an era of AI infrastructure investments and AI service developments, particularly those related to sovereign AI, that will be impacted by EC regulations. For more insight into why the letter is important, see this blog by seasoned tech analyst Richard Windsor.

Cloudflare, the independent, San Francisco, US-headquartered company that provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation and many other related services, says it is, “by default”, to protect its customer base by blocking AI bots from crawling through their websites and other content. Cloudflare has already developed a system to confuse the crawlers (although ‘leeches” would be a much better word to describe the pernicious bots that continuously steal copyrighted content to feed the insatiable maw of large language AI models) by allowing websites to send them down rabbit holes of AI-generated fake web pages and fake data to provide worthless outputs. What a great idea. Now Cloudflare is to further enhance its offering with the introduction of a “pay-per-crawl” (PPC) system. It will provide users with “more fine-grained control over how AI companies can access their sites”, and enable customers to accept or prevent AI bots, at will, on a case-by-case basis. Should a client agree to permit a bot into a website, the intent is to make the organisation behind the wandering algorithm pay hard-cash compensation for the privilege. In an email to the MIT Technology Review, Will Allen, Cloudflare’s head of AI privacy, control and media products, wrote, “Traditionally, the unspoken agreement was that a search engine could index your content, then they would show the relevant links to a particular query and send you traffic back to your website. That is fundamentally changing”, with creators and publishers demanding the power to determine who has access to their content, how it is used, how it is associated with the creative originators and how much they are paid for it. Cloudflare says its customers can now allow or disallow crawling for each stage of the AI life cycle, and is particularly able in areas such as training, fine-tuning and inference. Cloudflare customers are enabled to set a tariff rate card for how much it will cost AI bots to crawl their websites. For a long time now, crawlers are supposed to conform to any directions and instructions a website might specify through a ‘robots.txt’ file. Such directions may prohibit AI bot crawlers from almost every AI company, but that requirement is routinely ignored. Cloudflare has already introduced a “bot verification” system and, in a touching but evidently naive belief in the essentially altruistic and benign nature of the big tech platforms, the company hopes its system will bring about “good-faith negotiations between AI companies and website owners.” Good luck with that. Thankfully, Cloudflare is not so credulous as to be unarmed and will use its very extensive experience in dealing with bot-originated coordinated denial-of-service attacks to stop them in their tracks. Allen observes, “A web crawler that is going across the internet looking for the latest content is just another type of bot, so all of our work to understand traffic and network patterns for the clearly malicious bots helps us understand what a crawler is doing.” Then action can be taken. Cloudflare says it wants to protect the open internet by helping enable web publishers to make more sustainable deals with AI companies. “By verifying a crawler and its intent, a website owner has more granular control, which means they can leave it more open for the real humans if they’d like”, says Allen. One can hope. A detailed explanation of how Cloudflare’s ‘pay-per-crawl?’ system works can be found here.

Summer’s here. Temperatures in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and other parts of Europe that are favoured holiday haunts of sun-starved Brits are now getting up into the 40 degrees centigrade range. Such unpleasant and dangerous heat, and the ever-increasing costs people have to pay simply to get to and then stay where they will be roasted alive, is making some re-think their holiday plans. In years gone by, many might have opted to pay extra to take a vacation in the US, but given the massively intrusive entry process now afforded to visitors by US airport immigration officers, few are prepared to risk heading south of the 49th parallel. Still, it’s an ill-wind, as they say, and Canada is enjoying a bumper influx of UK tourists eager to enjoy a North American experience that does not involve the United States. Other Brits will be taking a staycation. A recent survey on behalf of Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) undertaken by Strand Partners and based on population data from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) found that up to 48% of UK holidaymakers are considering staying home this year. As usual many will travel up to Scotland where English and Welsh tourists will boost the Scottish economy by more than £5.25bn between now and the end of autumn. That equates to an average spend of £721 per person. This market opportunity has galvanised VMO2, which has slipped down the telco rankings since Vodafone and Three completed their recent merger and created the largest mobile network in the UK, to enhance its offering by upgrading its mobile network coverage in more than 13,000 Scottish postcodes, some of which are in the most remote parts of the Scottish Islands and Highlands. The rollout is part of VMO2’s wider “Mobile Transformation Plan”, which includes, in this year alone, a £700m investment into its mobile network. More will follow in 2026. Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, the research also shows that 33% of domestic holidaymakers say that mobile coverage (or the absence of it) has a direct influence on their choice of destination. Access to 4G and, wherever possible, 5G are regarded as ‘must-haves’. The Strand Partners research shows that while many holiday-making Brits like to go off the beaten track, 62% don’t want to go off-grid and lose access to GPS coverage or find themselves in the middle of a heather moor and unable to locate accommodation or, more importantly, pubs. Some 43% say streaming music or podcasts are very important to their “holiday experience”, while 31% of families are absolutely certain a reliable mobile signal is essential to keep children entertained, and moderately quiet, whilst travelling. The latest VMO2 upgrade includes highly popular tourist cities, such as Edinburgh, Perth and Stirling, as well as across rural areas. Amongst those are Corrour railway station, the loneliest place on Scotland’s West Highland Line. Corrour is the highest mainline railway station in the United Kingdom at an elevation of 1,340 feet (410 m) above sea level and experiences harsh winters. It is sited 71 miles and 54 chains from Craigendoran Junction. For those of you who don't understand old English measurements, a ‘chain’ is 22 yards (66 feet), and that is the certified length of a cricket pitch and will be so until Gabriel blows his horn. One of Corrour’s claims to fame is that it featured in the hugely popular film, ‘Trainspotting’. Another is that the Caledonian Express sleeper train passes daily through the sleepy station with a cargo of sleeping passengers. The few intrepid souls who do get off at Corrour will now be able to make a 4G call to friends and family to tell them they are lost. Another place to get an access upgrade is the airport on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. The ‘airport’ is the only one in the world where scheduled flights land on the beach – when the tide is out, of course. Tickets come with a free tide table. Also now connected to 4G are the Loch Ossian Eco Hostel and Glen Affric Hostel: They can be reached only on foot or by bicycle.  

– The staff, TelecomTV