Head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, Karen Egan, said the current take up rate “will certainly not justify the investment made in the company thus far.” Egan said the deal could “massively improve” Cityfibre’s prospects, especially in rural areas where Openreach is unlikely to venture anytime soon.

A report by Enders Analysis earlier this year titled “UK Altnets: The beginning of the end?”, captured the situation well. This week’s agreement between CityFibre and my employer, Sky, will – as well as hurting BT’s Openreach arm – accelerate the impetus to consolidate into fewer than a handful of players.

Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said the announcement was “a very positive move forward for CityFibre”, adding that it was “not good news” for Openreach and could potentially put some pressure on its wholesale prices.

It’s “a very positive move forward for CityFibre regardless, as Sky hitherto was showing no inclination to deal with anyone beyond Openreach,” said Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders.

“The cost of living crisis is making it harder for customers to afford new handsets – and some customers may not be able to afford the expense of upgrading when they would like to do so,” wrote market watchers at Enders Analysis in a note this week. “While inflation has come down to targeted levels, it will take some time for wages to catch up and for households to feel well off enough to make big purchases again, and so this impact may wane very slowly.”

Karen said “[Mittal] is not short-term. He’ll be completely constructive and collaborative with BT, he really understands the holistic approach of telecoms." She added that taking a stake in BT was not an obvious move for the company but Mittal’s experience will have given him an understanding of where BT needs to focus.

Joseph said the AI search market was “hotting up”. “The risk from AI is . . . that general web search as a whole is made redundant by new ways of matching users with information, products and services,” he said. The “big unknown”, however, is whether it can be reliable enough for mainstream use. “AI is stubbornly prone to confabulation,” Teasdale said. “At the scale of billions of queries per day, serious failures are inevitable.”

One of the key points of contention is the removal of proposals for controls on material that is “legal but harmful”. The wording sparked concerns of an incursion on free speech, but critics say the U-turn amounts to a watering down of the rules. “These original proposals were too far-reaching and did have the potential of incentivising platforms to limit free speech online,” says Niamh Burns at Enders Analysis. “But it could be argued disinformation has slightly fallen through the cracks in the end.”

Gareth said “The direction of travel for console sales is grim....Microsoft have had a terrible year; Sony have followed them having a terrible quarter. And in some respects, it's not a surprise because what we're seeing is that the model they’re offering is really coming under stress"