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Testing out internet speeds on an Oppo Reno 5G smartphone with EE’s network.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

London falls far behind other major European cities when it comes to the quality of its 5G connection, according to a report shared with CNBC.

The findings from fixed and mobile network benchmarking firm MedUX found that London ranked 10th for 5G quality of experience in Europe, out of a group of 10 cities that includes Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Lisbon.

The German capital had the best 5G experience overall, which MedUX attributed to Berlin’s outperformance in areas like network consistency across different levels of applications and overall low latency.

“They are very good at doing things properly,” Rafael Galarreta, chief marketing officer of MedUX, told CNBC in an interview.

“They are the best in particular worlds,” he added, highlighting the city’s prowess in video streaming and data for over-the-top media platforms.

MedUX uses robots to quality assess fixed and mobile wireless internet broadband, identifying and resolving network issues. The company works with telecom providers, regulators, and enterprises to benchmark and monitor networks.

According to MedUX, Berlin has the best 5G coverage of any European city overall, according to MedUX, with a 89.6% reach. It is also the best city overall for 5G streaming, with average latency of less than 40 milliseconds.

Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris scored the highest among European cities on MedUX’s overarching 5G quality benchmark. Lisbon, Milan and Porto were the runners up.

London, on the other hand, was close to the bottom of the ranking for European 5G networks. According to MedUX, nearly 77.5% of the city’s population has 5G on their devices now, below the urban average.

London also performs badly on downlink speeds, with MedUX data showing the city gives users an average download speed of 143 megabits per second (Mbps), compared to 528 Mbps for Lisbon, 446 Mbps for Porto, 326 Mbps for Barcelona.

Munich in Germany, the second-worst city for 5G downlink speeds, had average download speeds of 259 Mbps.

“The U.K. is struggling for several reasons,” Galaretta said. “We already spoke about the macro things, but the two most important dimensions in which the U.K. mobile networks are lagging behind is speed and accessibility, and network responsiveness.”

Network responsiveness, Galaretta said, affects latency, which impacts data-intensive applications like online gaming — and in particular cloud gaming, which provides constant delivery of games to an end user through a remote data center.

Huawei ban to blame?

Figures shared by MedUX also show a clear picture of how British carriers are underperforming their European peers on 5G quality.

EE ranks 12th out of the top 36 carriers across European markets for 5G network quality of experience, data MedUX shared with CNBC shows. Vodafone ranks 24th, while Three is 33rd. O2 comes in at number 36. These companies and EE owner BT weren’t immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC on Tuesday.

Galaretta highlighted the U.K.’s decision to ban Huawei from its 5G network as a possible reason behind the poor performance on 5G network quality.

The U.K. began rolling out 5G networks in 2019, as British carriers EE and Vodafone launched super fast data plans in the country for the first time.

It has faced struggles, after the U.K. government in the summer of 2020 announced Huawei would have to ban 5G equipment from its network completely by 2027. British carriers, which have heavily criticized the decision due to disruption to their rollouts, have been racing to dump Huawei gear in their core and non-core networks.

“This delayed deployment has likely affected overall coverage, availability, and user experience, particularly considering that the Huawei ban came after the initial rollout had already commenced,” Galaretta said.

Galaretta noted that quantifying the effects of the U.K.’s Huawei ban is a hard task, since MedUX’s research primarily focuses on measuring service quality and experience for end-customers.

Another factor at play, Galaretta noted, is the impact of industry mergers and acquisitions, along with the resulting pushback from regulators, which have led to disruptions to certain installations.

MedUX tests 5G quality across a number of different environments, including through radio technology samples and multi-thread download speed tests based on public content delivery networks.

It also takes into account the quality of usage of a range of different online services, including X, Facebook, YouTube streaming, the ease of accessing a certain URL, requests to gaming servers and navigating websites accessed through a Google Chrome browser.

Huawei competes with network infrastructure giants like Ericsson in Sweden and Nokia in Finland.

Despite Huawei’s ban from the U.K., the Chinese telecoms vendor still reportedly has a large presence in the country’s 5G network. According to a report from Strand Consulting, gear from Chinese vendors — among which Huawei is the only one active in Britain — still makes up some 41% of the U.K. 5G network.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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