Rostelecom, Tele2 and Ericsson have deployed a pilot 5G network at a conference in Russia to help monitor the health of visitors – and in particular their COVID-19 status. The pilot service, deployed on Tele2's network, enabled the remote health monitoring of visitors to the CIPR-2020 show, and included temperature checks and an overview of social distancing. Thermal imaging and mobile video terminals were installed and connected by commercially available offerings from Ericsson.

Tech titans such as Amazon and Google may be forced to share their customer data with smaller rivals under the terms of the European Union's forthcoming Digital Services Act legislation. That, at least, is the gist of a Financial Times report, cited by Reuters, that quotes what the newspaper says is an early draft of the proposed legislation. The draft also suggests that tech's big beasts will be banned from giving their own services preferential treatment on their platforms or pre-installing their own applications on devices, according to the FT.

New research from analyst firm Omdia has again ranked the UK seventh out of the 22 "leading 5G countries," with Switzerland, in the number-two slot, the only European country ahead of it. The rankings in the "Global 5G Progress Update" are based on commercial operator launches, network coverage, subscriber take-up, spectrum availability and the regulatory environment. Predictably, South Korea was by some margin the leader of the pack, with 5.8 million 5G subscribers. Figure 1:

Ekinops, the France-based optical transport specialist, has appointed Serbia's ALEF Distribucija ADRIA as its distributor across the Adriatic region.

Orange has teamed up with the Virtual University of Senegal (UVS) to launch a new online training platform, "Orange Campus Africa," which it hopes will allow university students to more easily access courses, particularly in the shadow of COVID-19. According to the operator, this platform tailors the training to local cultural contexts and allows for mobile payment in local currencies for "premium" services.

US-based Vonage, which is best known for its unified communications offerings, has landed a spot on the UK's G-Cloud 12 public-sector procurement platform for cloud services.

More than a quarter of Brits would prefer to use a health app than visit their actual, humanoid doctor, according to a new survey carried out by Quin, a digital health startup. Since the pandemic first reared its ugly head, usage of health apps has increased by 37%, says the study, though only 55% of those asked would trust a diagnosis provided by an app.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading