Industry News

Within moments of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom sent in requests for their shares to be reinstated to the New York Stock Exchange. China’s three incumbent telcos, filed three separate but largely identical written requests with the NYSE, asking for the latter’s decision to delist the three companies’ share

Youfone will launch fixed and mobile services in Belgium in April, having brokered a wholesale deal with incumbent operator Proximus. Heralding from the neighbouring Netherlands, Youfone has signed two agreements with Proximus, one that will allow it to operate as an MVNO on its mobile network and a second that facilitates fixed network access. “Youfone

New US President Biden has promoted FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to chair the regulator and the policing of social media is likely to be her biggest single task. Given her experience as an FCC Commissioner, Rosenworcel seems like a good appointment. She will presumably have a significant role in filling the position she vacates. That

Synchronization is one of the most critical functions of a communication system; however, in the context of 5G, especially for Time Division Duplex (TDD) where both uplink and downlink transmission is on the same frequency, the possibility of interference is much more significant. As a result, we see more stringent requirements for timing and synchronization

2021 is off to a flying start for satellite communications, with China launching the third satellite in its Tiantong-1 series and Elon Musk’s SpaceX sending its latest batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. The Tiantong 1-03 satellite was launched earlier this week from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, the Xinhua news

The smartphone brand spun out from Huawei in a bid to circumvent US sanctions is keen to show what a different proposition it is. At the core of any corporate transformation, of course, is a new brand strategy. New-look Honor is all about the slogan ‘go beyond’, which is just as substantial as you’d expect.

The most profound change in global supply chains in the coming years will be digitalisation, and as such companies that embrace IoT solutions will find themselves ahead of the competition. This is according to a new Internet of Things predictions report from Telenor Connexion. The company, which as an IoT connectivity and cloud services provider

Sunrise UPC is cutting staff as a result of its recent merger, despite initial talk of new opportunities. The Swiss telco did not specify how many jobs will be affected, but puts the number at “significantly less than 30%” of its current employees. At the end of the third quarter Sunrise had 1,763 full-time staff

The narrative around what UK operators should do to help the common cause persists, with the BBC writing a story apparently designed to pressure Vodafone. In a piece headlined ‘Lockdown: Vodafone will not offer free access to BBC Bitesize’, the Beeb laments ‘Vodafone will not offer data-free access to BBC Bitesize during lockdowns in the

Swedish kit vendor Ericsson had landed a welcome IoT deal win thanks to its partnership with Arkessa to provide global connectivity for Voi e-scooters. Arkessa specialises in IoT managed services and has been chosen by e-scooter provider to connect its global, app-based fleet. Voi is one of a growing number od electronic scooter rental providers

The French government will support fibre rollout in nearly a dozen tricky areas of the country to the tune of €420 million, it announced this week. Further, an additional €150 million will be allocated this summer, taking the state’s total spend to €570 million. The cash forms part of the France Relance project, a €100

The contentious Swedish 5G auction proceeded as planned and the country’s dominant MNO Telia was the narrow winner. It nearly didn’t happen, thanks to the decision to make the outcomes conditional on the winners going nowhere near any Chinese vendors for their 5G networks. Huawei reckoned this contravened EU law and lodged a few appeals,

Germany’s big three mobile operators have inked a pair of bilateral deals that effectively mean they will all share active mobile network equipment to boost 4G coverage. Deutsche Telekom has signed a letter of intent with Telefonica that will see the pair implement active network sharing at several hundred selected antenna sites to fill grey

2021 is off to a solid start for UK altnet CityFibre, which has broken ground on its full fibre network project in Reading and signed up another retail ISP customer. Construction work officially began in Reading’s Norcot and Battle area on Tuesday with the rest of the town to follow at a later date, CityFibre

The BBC has announced that its iPlayer online streaming service experienced a huge surge in viewing in the first full week of 2021…and it’s a pretty safe bet that no one is surprised to hear that. With the UK entering its third national lockdown at the start of that week, the list of alternatives to

Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange and Deutsche Telekom have signed one of those MoUs, committing to collaborate on the development of OpenRAN technology. You can read the full memorandum of understanding here. At a superficial level it’s the standard set of vows, aspirations and vague promises that we’ve come to associate with such things. On further inspection,

Mobily and Nokia are piloting 4G and 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) network slicing on the Saudi Arabian operator’s live network. Nokia heralded the Riyadh-based trial as the first sliced FWA deployment in the world. The trial is ongoing and is being conducted in multi-vendor environment Nokia said, without disclosing the identities of other vendors

Chinese gadget giant Xiaomi has been belatedly added to one of the US lists of companies its citizens aren’t allowed to interact with. “Today, the Department of Defense released the names of additional “Communist Chinese military companies” operating directly or indirectly in the United States,” says the DoD announcement. It goes on to talk about

Chinese vendor Huawei has had its main appeal against the terms of the Swedish auction declined, so it looks set to go ahead as planned. The news comes courtesy of Reuters, which reports that a Swedish court has ruled that a previous ruling allowing the auction to go ahead despite Huawei’s legal objections can’t be

Portugal has concluded the first part of its latest spectrum auction and it appears Masmovil has come out on top and will therefore become the country’s new mobile network operator. Anacom announced the completion of phase one of the spectrum sale earlier this week, but did not divulge the identity of the winner, or indeed

Telstra’s 5G network now covers half of the population of Australia, the telco announced on Thursday. Without wishing to detract from the Australian incumbent’s rollout – it is clearly making good progress in 5G – this appears to be yet another case of a telecoms operator’s marketing team pushing a statistic that doesn’t actually mean

5G technology is touted as an innovation platform that will enhance our connected world. To deliver on this promise, 5G will demand the network supporting it to be as flexible as the services running on it. The following high-level 5G uses cases are well understood and documented by the wireless industry: • Enhanced Mobile Broadband

Nuvia was founded by former Apple chip engineers and it’s in legal dispute with one of them, so Apple must be especially delighted it’s being acquired by Qualcomm. The acquisition of Nuvia by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion is primarily about the US chip giant’s continuing diversification away from the smartphone. One of the main drivers

Korean tech giant LG is the first major vendor to promise a smartphone with a rollable screen. Flexible screens have been the holy grail of smartphone innovation since the current form factor became ubiquitous over a decade ago. The past couple of years have seen the emergence of the foldy phone, but they don’t seem

A former employee of Japanese operator group Softbank, who now works for rival MNO Rakuten Mobile, has been arrested on suspicion of violating unfair competition prevention law. So says an announcement from SoftBank, which is currently only published in Japanese, so things may have been lost in Google translation. It says that, while the employee

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Jade Brooks, Associate in the Dispute Resolution team at Blaser Mills Law, takes us through the legislation governing the relationship between operators and landowners. Since 1984, the relationship between electronic communications network operators and site providers

This article is sponsored by Red Hat and Intel Operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) are being rewritten or refactored to cloud-native, microservices-based applications capable of running on hybrid cloud and multicloud computing and storage infrastructure. MYCOM OSI is leading the way in moving the much ‘stickier’ mission-critical OSS functions, involving data-intensive,

Small and medium sized businesses are being especially hard hit by the continual lockdowns, so Vodafone UK is smart to push the boat out for them. The press release talks of giving small businesses free broadband for 2021. While this is technically true, it only comes if they commit to a three year broadband contract,

Comcast Cable consumer president Dana Strong (pictured) will take over as the new group chief executive of Sky this year after longtime holder of the post Jeremy Darroch tendered his resignation. US-based Strong has a track record in the industry that matches her name. She has been in her current role at Sky’s parent company

Swiss IoT logistics company U-blox wants to merge with UK company Telit Communications, which does much the same, but the latter doesn’t like the terms of the deal. U-blox made its preliminary move on 20 November and they had to extend the process in mid-December because the two parties had yet to come to an