Industry News

In the middle of the ‘Russiagate’ debacle, the Trump administration reportedly forced Apple to provide data from the accounts of Democrat politicians. According to the New York Times, in 2017 ‘prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a

AT&T has completed a call on its recently acquired C-band spectrum, a further sign of the intense competition between the US telcos as they push on with 5G rollout. The news came from Nokia, which which is supplying radio equipment for AT&T’s 5G rollout over C-band. In fact, the companies passed this particular milestone a

It has been reported that French telecoms conglomerate Altice wants to raise a few euros by selling what’s left of the Portuguese business it acquired in 2014. The goss comes courtesy of Reuters, whose moles presumably combined their investigations with an early summer holiday. In between Pastéis de Nata washed down with chilled port, they

The beginning of summer brings with it the start of a major international football tournament and that can mean only one thing: a telco-backed survey on the TV viewing habits of UK fans. This year it was the turn of MVNO Sky Mobile, which published the results of some fairly straightforward research carried out earlier

Zoom is getting into hardware, with the launch of a range of branded desk phones aimed at the business market. No, you don’t need to read that again; it’s not a mistake. Videoconferencing specialist Zoom, which raised its profile stratospherically during the various Covid-19 lockdowns of the past 12 months or so, is actually flogging

UK communications regulator Ofcom has moved to beef up its digital economy expertise with the appointment of Amazon veteran Sachin Jogia as Chief Technology Officer. Jogia has spent the past nine years at Amazon, where he’s currently General Manager for Alexa Smart Home International. That means he should be clued up on the broader role

The collective 6G efforts of Finland and Japan have vowed to help each other out in a bid to move the nascent standard along. You can tell they’re serious because they signed one of those memoranda of understanding, so there’s no turning back now. They published it at the Nikkei Global Digital Summit, which noted

UK adults spent as much as an hour longer per day online than our peers in other major European markets in 2020, according to the latest research from Ofcom. Given that information, one cannot help but wonder what we were doing for that extra time…or rather, what our European neighbours were up to offline that

A bunch of media and government sites were offline earlier today following an issue with the Fastly edge cloud platform. Fastly operates a major content delivery network (CDN), which uses the principles of edge computing to run a bunch of geographically distributed datacenters designed to serve digital content more quickly. Regardless it looks like much

TIM is pushing further into the OpenRAN arena, this time with the launch of a new R&D centre in Turin. More specifically, the Italian incumbent has opened an OTIC – or Open Test and Integration Centre – Lab, which it will use to test new solutions and, it claims, accelerate the deployment of OpenRAN technology

UK operator group Vodafone won’t be running a physical stand at Mobile World congress later this month but hopes people will visit its virtual one. Spanish media reported the matter as if it was something new, however we understand the GSMA, which runs MWC, has been aware of Vodafone’s position for some time. The reason,

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Vincent Gatineau, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer for EllaLink, and Geoff Bennett Director of Solutions & Technology for Infinera, explore the evolution of submarine cables. From Closed to Open Cable Systems There are over 400 submarine

In a lab test led by Vodafone some AI special sauce was used to significantly boost the capacity of a multi-vendor OpenRAN set up. Joining the radio access network fun were Cohere Technologies, VMware, Capgemini Engineering, Intel and Telecom Infra Project. They cobbled together a new type of RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) that is positively

Deutsche Telekom is trumpeting a new 5G Voice over New Radio (VoNR) milestone, but while voice remains important, its impact on the data experience is what really matters. The German incumbent has announced the successful completion of what it says is the world’s first 5G VoNR call in an end-to-end multi-vendor environment. The call, carried

Aviva is joining a UK autonomous vehicle project in a bid to capture data that will enable it to insure such driverless vehicles when the time comes. The firm has agreed a five-year partnership with R&D outfit Darwin Innovation Group, which will initially see it join an existing autonomous vehicle trial at the Harwell Science

Apparently buying shares in a company materially helps it, so the US has extended its efforts to starve Chinese companies of investment. Inevitably this is framed as a ‘national emergency’ as is anything else the government feels like imposing on the world. The emergency in question was actually announced by the Trump presidency last November

Telefonica has lopped the best part of €4 billion from its debt pile in the space of a couple of days by closing the sale of towers in Europe and Latin America. The Spanish incumbent brokered a €7.7 billion, two-part deal to sell off 31,000 telecoms towers held by its Telxius Towers business to passive

A new system designed to improve road safety is being tried out on actual roads in the UK. It has been developed by Vodafone, Nokia and Chordant, with some kind of public sector seal of approval and maybe even public funds. Positioned as a ‘mobility cloud platform’, it seems to be an initial step towards

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,

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

Taiwanese chip manufacturing giant TSMC revealed it remains on track to start making cutting edge chips in Arizona by 2024. The announcement came during the company’s annual update, as covered by Reuters. The new fab in Arizona is set to cost around $12 billion, which is still just a small part of TSMC’s pledge to

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

Having cleared all its regulatory hurdles, the UK’s new converged telco is full of ambition, but going toe-to-toe with BT will be very expensive. “With the fastest broadband and most reliable mobile network in the UK today, Virgin Media O2 is the complete package,” said Lutz Schüler, CEO of VMO2, at its official launch. It’s

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

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

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.

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