Sky's broadband and TV arm will hire 1,000 new staff members, half of whom will be engineers.

The hires will bump Sky's UK and Ireland employee base to 25,000. The telco currently employs 3,500 engineers to service its circa 13 million customers across the region ( PDF page 14 ).

The business will also open a customer contact centre in Leeds, staffed by 500 customer service bods. Its agents will field complaints across Sky products via call, text, the MySky app chat and Facebook messenger chats, said the company in a statement.

In its annual results for fiscal 2018/19 (PDF)

Updated Broadband and cable business Virgin Media has inked a five-year deal with Vodafone UK to provide its network to more than three million customers.

The mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deal will replace Virgin Media's current agreement with BT, which expires in late 2021 and began in January 2017 .

Lutz Schüler, Virgin Media CEO, said: "Twenty years ago Virgin Mobile became the world's first virtual operator and this new agreement builds on that heritage."

"We've worked with BT to provide mobile services for many years and will continue to work together in a number of areas. We want

BT has launched a new 5G mobile and fixed-line home broadband service, dubbed Halo, in a bid to muscle into the converged market.

The service is available from a mere £57.99 per month, although existing 5G customers with BT Plus plans will be automatically upgraded to benefit from Halo.

It is the latest move towards BT's plan for an all-IP network, with plans under way to decommission its copper cables by 2027.

The package includes BT's fastest speeds at home and on the go via its fibre and 5G service, and BT's smart hub with Wi-Fi controls, unlimited mobile, home phone and

Ubiquiti Networks is fending off customer complaints after emitting a firmware update that caused its UniFi wireless routers to quietly phone HQ with telemetry.

It all kicked off when the US-based manufacturer confirmed that a software update released this month programmed the devices to establish secure connections back to Ubiquiti servers and report information on Wi-Fi router performance and crashes.

Ubiquiti told customers all of the information is being handled securely, and has been cleared to comply with GDPR, Europe's data privacy rules. Punters are upset they weren't warned of the change.

"We have started to gather crashes and other

China will dominate the global 5G market by 2025, along with the US, Japan and Korea, leaving Europe to lag behind, according to a study by global mobile operator data-wranglers at GSMA's Intelligence branch.

As of October 2019, 33 operators across 18 countries had launched commercial 5G mobile services, the fourth annual Global Mobile Trends report revealed today .

To put that in perspective, as the global mobile network operator trade body, the GSMA holds data on "all" of the 1,400+ operators and 1,200+ MVNOs "across 4,400+ networks, 65 groups and 237 countries and territories worldwide" - so there's a