Industry News

Huawei is losing another friend in Europe, if press reports that it has been shown the door by Italy’s TIM prove to be correct. The Italian incumbent is squeezing Huawei out of its 5G RAN contract, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing the usual unnamed sources and crediting Italian financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore as

Mobile chip giant Qualcomm is enlisting the help of OpenRAN cheerleader Vodafone to help it bring its smartphone methodology to the new radio paradigm. For decades Qualcomm has produced reference designs, which are pre-commercial devices housing its latest smartphone chips, made available to the rest of the smartphone ecosystem to muck about with in preparation

Swisscom and Salt are playing their cards close to their chests when it comes to the financial details of their new FTTH partnership, but it looks to be a good move. The pair unveiled a partnership deal that will effectively see Salt invest in the build-out of Swisscom’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network, but without actually taking

5G will mandate extensive product catalog capabilities for supporting new business models, use of network resources and for engaging with external ecosystems and third party partners, in order to effectively monetize new opportunities. Read this white paper to understand: Disparate product catalogs hold back innovation 5G will accelerate the evolution of CSP business models An

Satellite company SpaceX has received permission to halve the altitude at which its low earth orbit satellites float. SpaceX is run by US zillionaire Elon Musk, who is an early leader in the LEO market, having already lobbed over a thousand satellites, which deliver broadband to underserved areas, into orbit already. Those exist at a

Ethiopia has shared the names of just two bidding groups for its two available telecoms licences, a disappointing outcome from one of the world’s last great liberalisation opportunities. The deadline – pushed back from March – for submissions for the licences expired on Monday, at which point the Ethiopian Communications Authority (ECA) talked up the

OneWeb, the communications satellite company that investors refuse to give up on, has flogged a quarter of itself to Eutelsat for $550 million. The UK company’s business model seems to consist of burning through billions of dollars of investors’ cash, then asking for more. When the pandemic meant its previous long-suffering backers finally decided to

Spanish telco group Telefónica concluded its AGM by re-electing José María Álvarez-Pallete as Chairman and CEO, and unveiling a rebrand Álvarez-Pallete has been the double boss of Telefónica since 2016. He received 84% of the shareholder vote to keep his job, a higher number than he managed in 2017, implying investors are happy with his

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Phil Siveter, Nokia CEO for UK & Ireland, gives us the Nokia perspective on the importance of automation in telecoms networks. The world is at a key inflection point whereby intelligent technology is freeing humans from

Orange posted a fairly solid set of first-quarter results on Thursday, all things considered, but it was hard not to notice the fly in the ointment that is its Spanish operation. The telco is starting to see some green shoots of recovery in a market characterised by aggressive competition, but while executives insisted it will

Nascent US MNO Dish is the latest telecoms company to go all-in on the public cloud, entrusting Amazon Web Services to handle its entire 5G network. This arrangement would appear to take the telecoms/public cloud dynamic to a new level with everything to do with the Dish 5G network, including the non-hardware components of its

Consumer advice outfit Which has published the results of its annual customer satisfaction survey, which revealed UK MVNO customers are its happiest. The four MNOs, which serve the vast majority of UK mobile customers, did relatively badly, with best-placed O2 still only managing fifth place among 15 providers surveyed. Three was the lowest of them,

The deadline for Orange’s public takeover bid for its Belgian business is fast approaching and the telco has indicated it will not leave its €22-per-share buyout offer on the table indefinitely. “The offer [period] is closing at 4 o’clock tomorrow,” Orange’s group CFO Ramon Fernandez said on the telco’s first-quarter results call on Thursday. He

The autopilot function of smart electric cars made by Tesla is under intense scrutiny following a recent fatal accident. Last week Tesla boss Elon Musk noted his cars with autopilot engaged have a much lower chance of having an accident than the average vehicle. “Because every Tesla is connected, we’re able to use the billions

The C-band (or midband) is considered the “waterfront property” of RF spectrum for 5G. It offers the best compromise between RF coverage and RF bandwidth and Providers are investing heavily on C-band 5G deployment to deliver the coverage and capacity that 5G use cases need. While C-band is the best RF spectrum for 5G deployments,

The biggest takeaway from Q1 reporting season is that in this, the 5G rollout phase, the impetus remains with the tower providers rather than the mobile operators themselves. Crown Castle this week boosted its full-year outlook on the back of a strong set of first-quarter numbers that showed, amongst other things, that it is benefiting

Mavenir is making headlines, announcing a new OpenRAN development centre in the UK, scoring a $500 million investment from Koch Industries and even getting a new logo. The software vendor’s development centre is in Swindon, a stone’s throw, relatively speaking, from the OpenRAN Test and Integration Lab that Vodafone plans to launch at its Newbury

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece James Gray, Managing Director, Graystone Strategy shares his further thoughts in the Canadian MVNO market. Recently I put the finishing touches to a blog looking at the competitive landscape in the Canadian mobile market, one that’s

The European Commission is proposing new rules that will allow it to ban any form or implementation of AI it deems too risky. Having kept its head down for a bit following the Covid vaccine debacle, the EC is back with a vengeance, vowing to make up for lost time by embarking on a banning

UK telco Vodafone has been banging on about OpenRAN for a while and is its biggest domestic cheerleader, so it’s good to see it lead from the front by investing in its development. The latest investment takes the form of an OpenRAN Test and Integration Lab at its Newbury technology campus, which it announced today.

Lucky VM broadband punters in Southampton and Manchester could be set for blistering download speeds if the latest trials are anything to go by. VM is describing them as ‘proof-of-concept trials’ in which engineers hooked up existing domestic fibre connections to its new Hub 4 router, which comes as standard with its Gig1 broadband service.

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Marco Hogewoning, Manager of Public Policy & Internet Governance at the RIPE NCC, looks at what it will take for satellite connectivity to become commercially successful. The satellite Internet industry has taken off at great speed

While many things slowed down for businesses during the pandemic, digital transformation was not one of them. A McKinsey Global Survey of executives finds, for example, that companies accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions by three to four years and the share of digital or digitally enabled products by an astonishing seven

Two reports analysing operators’ 5G performances in the US and the UK have put EE and AT&T slightly ahead of their peers respectively, but there are no sweeping winners. Research firm RootMetrics published its latest “5G in the US” report to analyse 5G performance by the three national operators in the first half of 2021.

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In his final letter to shareholders as CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos looked back on the achievements during his tenure, laid out visions on multiple fronts for the company, and defended its track record in labour relations. In keeping with his annual pattern, Jeff Bezos penned a letter to Amazon’s shareholders. What’s different from the

The US House of Representatives has given the thumbs-up to a report that recommends a raft of legal measures designed to curb the power of Big Tech. The ‘Final Report on Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets’ runs to no less than 450 pages. Essentially it asks whether the US tech giants have become too

Strategy Analytics forecasts that the global smartphone wholesale revenues will increase by 13% in 2021, driven primarily by pent-up demand during the pandemic and increased device price. The research firm published a snapshot of its forecast of the global smartphone market for 2021. While the wholesale market value of smartphones went down by 5% globally

With 42 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to generate 80 zettabytes of data by 20251 and 5 billion mobile phone users currently generating 2.5 exabytes of data daily, it is no surprise that 95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a serious problem for their businesses. This comprehensive e-book

New data from research firm Counterpoint reveals Vivo and Oppo are scrapping it out for the top smartphone spot in China, with Huawei now a distant third. Huawei commanded almost half of the Chinese smartphone market at recently as Q2 of last year, according to Counterpoint, but that has fallen off a cliff. Of course