The United Kingdom’s biggest broadband providers are ditching data caps during the COVID-19 pandemic. Measures to help those struggling to pay are also in place in an effort to keep everyone connected.

Facebook and Qualcomm are working together to provide high-speed connectivity to urban areas. They’ll use Facebook Terragraph technology to build a multi-node wireless system based on 60GHz technology from Qualcomm.

The goal is to provide multi-gigabytes per second speed at a lower cost.

You’ll never be without an Internet connection in U.K. towns and cities in the future, thanks to Wi-Fi-emitting sidewalks.

Chesham in Buckinghamshire has become the first town to deliver Wi-Fi at speeds of up to 166 Mbps, seven times the average broadband speed in the U.K., through “Smart Pavements” courtesy of broadband provider Virgin Media.

Think Google’s 1Gbps fiber speeds are impressive? Think again. BT and Alcatel-Lucent have teamed up to achieve lightning-fast speeds of 1.4 terabits per second in the U.K. — that’s over 10,000 faster than the current fastest consumer broadband available in Britain, and it will let you download 44 full-length HD movies in a single second.

What’s more, it was achieved using existing fiber broadband cables.

EE, currently the United Kingdom’s only 4G LTE provider, has just announced that it will double its 4G speeds in 12 cities starting tomorrow, July 4. The carrier says that the average connection will increase to between 12 Mbps and 30 Mbps, which is twice the average speed of home broadband in the U.K.

EE has also announced new “pay-for-speed” plans that will allow customers to pay higher fees for faster connections from September.

Credit: David Sedlmayer, used under a Creative Commons license.

Today is the day that will bring us one step closer to the death of the cloud. That crucial new part of the internet that is gaining popularity due to the likes of Hulu, Netflix, MobileMe, DropBox, Crashplan, etc. is about to get another blow — AT&T on Monday started restricting the amount of data its millions of broadband customers are able to use in a month. Data is now restricted to as little as 150GB a month.

That isn’t good news — users should an uproar over the whole thing. It means that a large number of people using broadband in the U.S. will be severely limited in what they can do online. They might risk extra charges or even total loss of their broadband access. This comes as Apple is rumored to be on the verge of introducing a more Cloud-based model of computing for millions of customers.