Ofcom is amenable to technical tweaks that mobile operators have requested to 5G rules, launching a consultation yesterday.

The Big Four – Telefónica UK, Vodafone, BT's EE and Hutchison's Three – as well as fifth 5G licensee UK Broadband want to increase the power limits permitted in the 3.4Ghz, 3.5Ghz and 3.6Ghz spectrum licences from 25dBm to 28dBm, and move the guard band requirement above 3605MHz.

The tweaks would help mobile firms roll out 5G in the high frequency 3.4-3.6Ghz bands, by smoothing the path for Active Antenna Systems

"Ofcom is minded to grant the all of the licence variations," the

BlackBerry has said it will open up its BBM Enterprise encrypted chat service to all-comers as the consumer version nears death.

The pioneering OTT (over-the-top) chat service was first introduced in 2005 and after BlackBerry's refusal to unbundle it from its phones became widely imitated, allegedly most successfully by WhatsApp. BlackBerry is belatedly suing WhatsApp owner Facebook (and others) for patent infringement.

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The mobile firm finally announced a cross-platform version in 2013 and threw the (unencrypted) consumer BBM over to Emtek three years later. The rescue act has been prompted by Emtek's decision to shutter consumer BBM on

Huawei top brass took to the stage in Shenzhen this week to insist that everything was fine and dandy in the company's world, despite the shrieking from US lawmakers.

In front of an audience of 750, deputy chairman Ken Hu described 2018 as an "eventful" year for the company and thanked the assembled media for "paying so much attention" to the Chinese outfit.

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If 2018 was eventful, it'll be interesting to see how Hu describes 2019. The US has ramped up the rhetoric by threatening its pals with a withdrawal of security cooperation if they buy kit from

Cisco has issued a security patch for a flaw in some of its routers that can be exploited by miscreants to potentially rifle through telecommunications networks.

Switchzilla says the vulnerable kit – the ASR 9000, a family of high-end gear aimed at carrier and telco edge deployments – can, in certain circumstances, be hijacked by unauthenticated hackers if they can reach it across the internet or internal network.

According to the US tech giant, the flaw lies within the system administration virtual machine used by the devices' IOS XR 64-bit operating system:

It went on to clarify:

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