Industry News

Six countries have imposed special taxes on the revenues internet companies derive from their citizens and the US isn’t happy about it. The US Trade Representative (USTR) has completed an investigation into the matter and, to everyone’s surprise, concluded government policy is beyond reproach. After having a really good look at it from all possible

Progress in Portugal’s controversial 5G spectrum auction has been so slow that the regulator has been forced to change the rules to enable more bidding rounds per day. Wednesday marked the 100th day of bidding in the auction, in which the country’s established mobile operators are battling it out, albeit in a highly leisurely fashion,

EE, the UK’s biggest mobile operator, has deployed Nokia’s Self-Organizing Networks software to enhance network management and service quality. Nokia also claims that the new deal confirms its position as the biggest supplier to BT, EE’s parent company. Also included in the deal with EE is a Software Development Kit (SDK), with which EE can

Consumers, enterprises and governments will benefit greatly as 5G networks and Multi-Access Edge Computing (or MEC, formerly known as Mobile Edge Computing) capabilities are deployed over the next decade. In this position paper, we consider the vital role location intelligence plays in a 5G MEC world – from building out the infrastructure to enabling a

Lumenisity is a UK startup developing a new kind of fibre technology, which claims to reduce optical latency by 50%. The company was spun out of the University of Southampton and came out of stealth mode last autumn. It hasn’t taken long for it to catch the eye of major telcos, with BT partnering with

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Ray Williamson, Director of European Product Management, Huawei Wireless, takes a look at what could also be called 5.5G. What is 5G Advanced?5G is pushing the boundaries not only of our mobile communications systems but also of

It’s a good day for China’s Xiaomi, which has confirmed reports that it is no longer blacklisted in the US and shared first-quarter numbers that show pretty stellar growth. “Xiaomi is pleased to announce that on May 25, 2021 at 4:09 pm (Eastern Standard Time), the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued

Social media giant Facebook has announced it will be shadow-banning accounts that repeatedly share stuff it doesn’t approve of. A post by Facebook titled Taking Action Against People Who Repeatedly Share Misinformation stated, “Starting today, we will reduce the distribution of all posts in News Feed from an individual’s Facebook account if they repeatedly share

With the spring bank holiday weekend looming in the UK many will be hitting the road for a quick getaway, and O2 is using this to its advantage, trumpeting the strength of its 4G network coverage along the country’s major arteries. Unfortunately, its announcement was overshadowed somewhat by the publication of new data from RootMetrics

UK fixed line wholesaler Openreach has outlined plans to extend its fibre rollout to three million rural premises. This takes its total pledge to 25 million premises connected and is apparently in line with the government commitment to deliver ‘gigabit capable broadband’, whatever that mean in practice, to 85 percent of the UK by 2025.

Orange Ventures has set up a new investment vehicle to back what could probably best be described as ‘worthy cause’ start-ups, giving it €30 million of funding to dole out. The new vehicle, known as Orange Ventures Impact, will back French and other European start-ups in their seed stage or with proven development potential, the

Tech giant Amazon is so concerned about its warehouse workers’ mental health that it’s providing capsules in which they can sit and sort their heads out. They’re called AmaZen, presumably because they’re so calming and reassuring. ‘During shifts employees can visit AmaZen stations and watch short videos featuring easy-to-follow wellbeing activities, including guided meditations, positive

Singtel distracted the industry from a weak set of full-year results with the publication of a new strategy that includes the planned sale of a broad swathe of infrastructure assets. The Singaporean incumbent joins a long list of global telecoms operators looking to monetise infrastructure. It has already made a start, having kicked off the

Chinese smartphone vendor Oppo has launched a new phone that contains the first eSIM compatible with standalone 5G. We don’t know what special sauce has to go into an eSIM for it to work with SA (proper) 5G, as opposed to NSA (preliminary) 5G but, with help from French tech company Thales, Oppo reckons it’s

Vodafone Germany is expanding what it terms its “network offensive,” building out new base stations and 5G masts at a time of increasing network traffic. The mobile operator this week declared that it will undertake more than 7,000 mobile infrastructure build projects in the current financial year, which began in April, including 3,000 5G projects

As rumoured a week ago, etail and cloud giant Amazon is buying movie studio MGM to augment its Amazon Prime SVoD offering. The word on the street was that MGM would cost around $9 billion when we covered the rumour, but in the end Amazon managed to shave over half a bil off that. For

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, Telia, and Vodafone jointly start Eco Rating labelling scheme to score how sustainable mobile phones are, aiming to encourage device makers and device buyers to be more environmentally minded. Starting from June, the labelling scheme will stamp a score on phones to show how environmentally friendly the devices are throughout their

There are signs that bulk censorship and state surveillance may have reached their high-water mark, at least in the West. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a Senate Bill designed to allow Florida residents to sue social media platforms if they feel they have been unfairly censored. It specifies greater transparency regarding content moderation practices

Last week Google almost apologetically slipped out the news that it’s merging its wearable device OS with Samsung’s one. Wear is the stripped-down version of Android designed for smart watches and that sort of thing. It doesn’t seem to have taken off, presumably in part due to the fact that the biggest Android device maker

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Paul Wright, VP of Sales and Customer Operations at Cambridge Broadband Networks Group (CBNG), looks at what it will take to make a success of FWA. As regulators worldwide prepare for 5G, some operators with enterprise Fixed

CEO Tim Höttges on Thursday kicked off the sort of capital markets day aimed more at making Deutsche Telekom investors feel more like they were at a spa than a high-level strategy briefing. It wasn’t just his branded bomber jacket paired with matching magenta trainers that gave off a health club vibe, it was his

Mobile operator trade body the GSMA, which runs Mobile World Congress, held a press conference that came over like a plea for people to attend this year’s event. When the conference was announced, with just a day’s notice, the natural suspicion was that they were going to call the whole thing off. There haven’t been

NTT and SKY Perfect JSAT have announced plans to work together to build an integrated computing network in space that will include, among other things, space-based data centres. The Japanese operator is essentially pitching this as a CSR initiative, talking up the role of the new space business in helping work towards a sustainable society.

OpenRAN mania is officially underway, it seems, with spending on OpenRAN compatible kit and software going through the roof in the first quarter of his year. The news comes courtesy of estimates from analyst firm Dell’Oro, which published them in a blog. “Preliminary estimates suggest total Open RAN revenues – including O-RAN and OpenRAN compatible

5G is flourishing in the smartphone market, but that is not enough for Qualcomm, which has launched chipsets designed for use in all sorts of other gadgets.. The US chip maker is hosting its annual 5G Summit this week, giving it a platform to show off its latest wares. Arguably the most eye-catching are the

Communications group Liberty Global has joined forces with digital infrastructure investment firm Digital Colony to launch Atlas Edge Data Centres. The joint venture will build a bunch of data centres across Europe, designed to cater for edge computing. ‘The company aims to serve the growing demand from cloud providers, streaming services and enterprises for high-performance,

The merger of UK mobile operator O2 with cableco Virgin Media is set to close in a matter of days, having cleared its final regulatory hurdle: the approval of the competition watchdog. It was really a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) would green light the proposed tie-up.

Connected cars aren’t much good if they stop being connected as soon as you cross a border, so Ericsson and Volvo are on the case. The claim to the first cross-border 5G network vehicular handover needs to be qualified by the fact that the car in question doesn’t seem to have actually crossed any national

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Amir Khan, CEO of Alkira, argues that as the world of enterprise networking transitions to a new sort of connectivity, built for the needs of the cloud era, service providers must be careful not to get left

Google has previewed the next version of Android which, once more, claims to empower the user to adapt and secure their device experience. Just as smartphones haven’t significantly evolved in a decade, having hit their optimal form factor quickly, so trying to innovate their operating systems has proven tricky. Most users just want them to