Disruption of access to the Internet can cause, at least, frustration and more seriously can have significant economic and welfare consequences.

A large proportion of Internet traffic is carried over optical fibre cables. But because of the environment they inhabit, cables are particularly vulnerable.

Some of the more well-known causes of disruption to communications include construction workers drilling through cable ducts and boats dragging their anchors over submarine cables.

But other causes of disruption are more surprising. Thousands of people in the UK recently had their broadband restored after it failed because rats chewed through cables. Engineers discovered nesting rats had chewed through ducting, outer casing and multiple cables – equipment which usually needed a drill to get through.

Talking of wildlife, there also have been reports of sharks biting through submarine cables leading to changes in cable design to inhibit their appetite.

But the unpredictability of the effect of human activities on online access surpass wildlife any day:

For 18 months, at precisely 7am every day, the broadband signal in a tiny Welsh village simply vanished. Engineers were sent to the remote settlement to investigate the problem. They spent days testing connections and replacing cables until they finally got to the root of the problem – one villager’s old television. The resident turned his second-hand television on each day at 7am. It created a burst of “electrical noise” that brought down the neighbourhood’s broadband.

Wireless signals aren’t immune to unintended consequences either. Mobile network operators have reported an increasing problem of trees planted near base stations obstructing mobile signals. These trees were planted as part of the planning conditions to ameliorate the environmental impact of new mobile sites. An operator was recently quoted as saying: “Trees grow but mobile antennae don’t!”

PTT doesn’t provide courses on rats, sharks, old televisions, or trees. But we do offer a range of telecoms related courses including those covering cable installation and protection and finding faults.

Mobile technology has changed dramatically in the 30 years that PTT has been operating. Over those years, PTT has kept abreast 0f developments and has always ensured that network engineers have access to training on the latest technologies.

To celebrate our 30th anniversary, we are offering 30% off our bundle of 5 online courses covering mobile and wireless networks and services.
PTT courses range from those covering basic mobile fundamentals, through to those detailing modern mobile systems.

Click here to find out more about this special offer and to purchase now >>

To many, 5G is just supercharged LTE with faster access to the Internet while on the move. But the developers of 5G technology had a much wider vision for the future of wireless communications. Recent announcements have pointed to what that future could hold.
Nokia recently demonstrated a fixed wireless access (FWA) network operating in the mmWave band that provides download speeds of over 2 Gigabits per second at a distance of 10 kilometres. FWA provides broadband services to homes and businesses wirelessly as an alternative to, for example, connections over fibre.
Although operating at extremely high frequencies (EHF) provides the much wider bandwidths necessary for high data transfer rates, signals at these frequencies suffer high loss which in turn limits their maximum range.
So, achieving a 10 km range is significant as it opens the possibility of offering a high speed FWA service to rural communities where alternatives are either not available or offer a poor performance.

In another development Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson demonstrated a “real world” business application for 5G.  This example of network slicing allows an organisation’s employees to securely access private cloud-based applications over a public mobile network. Built-in automation simplifies the configuration and provisioning for users.
This proof of concept demonstrates how enterprises will be able to create and tailor network slices easily to fit their applications and user needs.

PTT offers a range of courses covering the technologies that provide 5G mobile, FWA and network slicing ranging from the introductory course “Wireless communications” to a course covering the detail of 5G mobile systems.