As if you needed another reason to love Belfast, residents of the Northern Ireland capital enjoy the fastest and most reliable mobile network performance in the UK, while Londoners are stuck in the slow lane.

RootMetrics' survey of 16 UK metro areas found Belfast to have the most reliable mobile performance – while only Leicester beat it for speed (just). Belfast also ranked second for phone call reliability (behind Manchester), with Newcastle and London vying for last.

For the record, Birmingham's relative ranking has diminished , while Manchester remained in the top three for three categories – but a miserable

Juniper and Ericsson are extending a long-standing love-in to cover 5G network tech.

In the joint product bag, Ericsson will handle everything from the air interface to base station backhaul, and Juniper will haul packets around the core network.

Ericsson's contribution will be access networking (the Router 6000 platform providing Common Public Radio Interface, CPRI, and Ethernet CPRI transport), and its MINI-LINK microwave systems. It will also provide management and orchestration across its own and Juniper's products.

Juniper's contribution to the portfolio includes its MX and PTX Series routers, and the SRX Series firewall and gateway.

The companies highlighted 5G's

The US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that a phone service over the internet is no longer a phone service but an "information service" – freeing it from regulatory oversight.

That means, in the eyes of the court, voice-over-IP (VoIP) is not considered a public utility, and thus it is not subject to price restrictions and other rules that phone lines fall under – meaning, for example, VoIP costs can be jacked up by providers.

The judgment [PDF] concerns Charter Communications and stems from a decision by the biz to break off its VoIP services into a new

Two things are happening at Palo Alto Networks: it is losing less cash, and the latest exec to reside in the head shed is rubbing his hands together at the prospect of selling more tech as a service.

The enterprise networking security biz reported a loss of $2.3m for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 , ended 31 July, compared to a $38m loss in the same quarter a year ago. This was on $658.1m in sales, up $150m year-on-year and beating analysts' consensus forecasts of $634m.

Product sales were $267.6m, up 26 per cent and stuff sold as a

A few months back we first brought word of the progress being made in unlocking the SMART Response XE, an ATmega128RFA powered handheld computer that allowed teachers to create an interactive curriculum in the days before all the kids got Chromebooks. Featuring 2.4 Ghz wireless communication, a 384×160 LCD, and a full QWERTY keyboard, schools paid around $100 each for them 2010. Now selling for as little as $5 on eBay, these Arduino-compatible devices only need a little coaxing and an external programmer to get your own code running.

The previous post inspired [Larry Bank] to try his hand at …read more