Belgium's Citymesh has joined forces with TowerEye to bring temporary private 4G and 5G connections for festivals and other large-scale events. The connectivity is intended to help with the scanning of tickets, contactless payments and COVID-19 mitigation measures, among other things. Citymesh's expertise is in private LTE, while TowerEye specializes in wireless networks and camera surveillance.

If you want 5G with real zip, you need to get out of London. That's one possible conclusion to draw from the latest Rootmetrics report on 5G in the UK, which found that Glasgow (144.3 Mbit/s), Birmingham (143.5 Mbit/s) and Belfast (130.8 Mbit/s) are the three cities with the fastest aggregate 5G speeds in the country. London, meanwhile, ranked a lowly sixth for speed and seventh for availability. In terms of operators, BT-owned EE ruled the roost, posting the highest 5G availability in the UK's three fastest 5G cities and in the three biggest cities as well.

Telxius, which is based in Spain but boasts a subsea portfolio connecting the US, Latin America, Europe and beyond, has deployed 400 GigE technology throughout its network, courtesy of Ciena and Infinera.

Telecom Italia (TIM) has appointed Quang Ngo Dinh as CEO of subsidiary Olivetti, which these days is predominantly concerned with the Internet of Things. Rome-born Quang's track record takes in spells at Wind and Vodafone, and he joined TIM Group in September 2019.

Vodafone Greece is drawing on VMware technology to launch its own-brand SD-WAN offering.

Sweden's Enea has landed a $3.5 million analytics deal with an unnamed North American vendor of cloud networking products covering what Enea calls embedded traffic classification software. The vendor in question will embed Enea's Qosmos ixEngine in its SD-WAN offering to provide detailed traffic information used for WAN optimization, QoS, firewalling and reporting.

Sir Clive Sinclair, the British inventor who made home computing popular and in a sense presaged the rise of the smartphone with his ZX series of computers in the early 1980s, has died at the age of 81. In an interview with the BBC in 2013, Sir Clive revealed that he didn't use computers any more, seeing them as a distraction from more important work. "My wife very kindly looks after that [the computing side of things] for me," said Sir Clive.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading