Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: EE fined for over-billing; Vodafone cozies up in the frozen north; Oracle opens cloud accelerator.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

January 18, 2017

2 Min Read
Eurobites: Velcom Virtualizes Core With ZTE

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: EE fined for over-billing; Vodafone cozies up in the frozen north; Oracle opens cloud accelerator.

  • Telekom Austria Group 's Belarussian subsidiary, Velcom , has worked with China's ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063; Hong Kong: 0763) to build what it describes as the world's first fully virtualized core network. During the nine-month project, all legacy core network components were migrated to a fully virtualized platform on OpenStack-based NFV and standard hardware. ZTE deployed its TECS (Tulip Elastic Cloud System -- loved their third album) software to carry out the migration. (See ZTE Helps Velcom Build Fully Virtualized Core.)

    • EE , the UK mobile operator owned by BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), has been fined £2.7 million (US$3.3 million) by regulator Ofcom for over-billing its customers. The regulator found that EE customers who called the operator's 150 customer services number while roaming within the EU were charged as if they were calling the US, and so were billed £1.20 ($1.40) a minute rather than the correct rate of 19p (23 cents) per minute. More than 32,000 customers were overcharged, racking up around £245,700 ($301,916) in total excessive charges.

    • Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) has been busy making/keeping friends in the Nordics/Baltics, renewing its strategic partnership with TDC A/S (Copenhagen: TDC) in Denmark and Norway and announcing a new partner market agreement with Tele2 in Sweden, Latvia and Lithuania. Under the terms of the former, TDC's mobile customers will continue to be able to use Vodafone's network for mobile voice and data roaming, while Vodafone's customers visiting Denmark will be able to make use of the reciprocal arrangement on TDC's mobile network. As for the latter, multinational customers of Tele2 in Sweden, Latvia and Lithuania will be able to avail themselves of Vodafone Global Enterprise services.

    • Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), the US database giant, is to open an Israeli startup "accelerator" that will be oriented very much towards cloud-related innovation, Bloomberg reports. Israel is a happening place, tech-wise -- check out this LR video for the lowdown on so-called "silicon wadi."

    • Italian network operator Retelit has deployed Coriant 's 100G gear in a bid to help it keep pace with the increasing demand for high-bandwidth services and provide a resilient 100G-enable terrestrial transit network for traffic crossing Europe and Asia via Retelit's AAE-1 subsea landing station in Bari, Italy.

    • Telefónica is set to splash $70 million on original TV content for its Movistar service over the course of a year, according to a report on Broadband TV News.

    • Safenames, a UK-based domain name registration company, is deploying Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT)'s DDoS mitigation service, which reroutes Safenames' traffic through its "scrubbing" infrastructures. Level 3 recently placed a point of presence (PoP) in Safenames' data center in the UK's Midlands region.

      — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Paul Rainford

Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

Paul is based on the Isle of Wight, a rocky outcrop off the English coast that is home only to a colony of technology journalists and several thousand puffins.

He has worked as a writer and copy editor since the age of William Caxton, covering the design industry, D-list celebs, tourism and much, much more.

During the noughties Paul took time out from his page proofs and marker pens to run a small hotel with his other half in the wilds of Exmoor. There he developed a range of skills including carrying cooked breakfasts, lying to unwanted guests and stopping leaks with old towels.

Now back, slightly befuddled, in the world of online journalism, Paul is thoroughly engaged with the modern world, regularly firing up his VHS video recorder and accidentally sending text messages to strangers using a chipped Nokia feature phone.

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