In response to another – yet another – failure on the SeaMeWe-3 submarine cable, Australian telco Vocus has lit up its ASC submarine cable ahead of schedule.

Vocus reported the fault at 9.34 am Australian Eastern Standard Time yesterday and, on investigation, identified the problem as a break around 1.2 km from the Tuas, Singapore cable station.

Since cable repairs can take up to a month to complete, Vocus this morning decided to light up its Australia-Singapore Cable (ASC) early and start migrating customer traffic to the new route.

The company had previously announced September 14 as the cable's ready-for-service

For years, internet engineers have predicted that the cost of an ever-smaller pool of IPv4 addresses would cause people to shift to the internet's new IPv6 protocol. Well, it finally appears to be happening.

Speaking at the annual conference of Australian Network Operators late last week, the managing director of ISP Aussie Broadband, Phillip Britt, told attendees that his company had decided to speed up IPv6 adoption after it calculated the growing cost of sticking with IPv4.

"The high cost of IPv4 space led to us speeding up our IPv6 project," Britt noted in his presentation [PDF], "and we are

The West Midlands is to become the first UK urban 5G testbed area at a cost of up to £50m – with one use for the new tech being China-style AI-powered CCTV cameras with automated facial recognition, according to the government.

The Urban Connected Communities Project, UK.gov-speak for "the latest wheeze we're tipping cash into", is tasked by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (aka Minifun) with trialling 5G, which is the latest global spec

BT has won a five-year contract to supply comms and IT services to various chunks of the NHS.

BT reckoned the deal will help medics get themselves and their patients' data on the cloud, and then to "access patient data securely over high-bandwidth digital connections".

The Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) contract covers 24 NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups, mostly based across the Home Counties and including Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent, among others.

"Trusts and CCGs will be able to choose the connections best suited to meet the needs of their patients as they update their

A proposal for securing BGP – the protocol that lays out the traffic pathways of the internet – has a another backer: NIST, aka America's National Institute for Standards and Technology.

The US government agency has issued a discussion paper outlining the use of Route Origin Validation ( ROV ) to protect the notoriously all-too-trusting Border Gateway Protocol ( BGP ) from route hijacking .

BGP, in a nutshell, allows the patchwork of large networks that make up the global internet announce to each other how to thread everyone's connections through mazes of machines crisscrossing the planet until they reach