Weighing in on the rumpus in a prepared statement, Sara Rasumussen, CCO of Sweden's Telness Tech, welcomed the ruling: "Mergers don't mean new services, if anything they mean more of the same thing. What they really do is stamp out competitors, and leave little room in the market for new entrants … Equal opportunity is crucial to push forward the telecoms industry and if a few companies in a market own the infrastructure, customer base and the relationship with the regulators, that opportunity for start ups to enter the market is gone."

Inhabitants of Shetland, the archipelago to the north of mainland Scotland, could be without landline, mobile and broadband services until the weekend as a result of a trawler accidentally cutting a subsea cable on Thursday. As the Guardian reports, engineers are working to reroute services via other networks. Only last week another subsea cable, connecting Shetland with the Faroe Islands, was severed in what was thought to be a similar trawler-related incident.

Nordic operator Telia took a 300 million Swedish kroner (US$26.4 million) hit from increased energy costs in the third quarter, but still managed to increase adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) by 4.3% year-on-year, to SEK8.07 billion ($711 million). In a statement that got positively meteorological, Telia CEO Allison Kirkby said: "Telia's third quarter results show continued commercial momentum with service revenue growing 2.3% and all our units delivering positive service revenue growth for the first time in several years. Macroeconomic headwinds, however, strengthened from a breeze to a mild storm during the summer, with sharply higher energy prices and interest rates." Batten down the hatches, guys…

Turkcell has deployed a disaggregated distributed backbone router (DDBR) Internet gateway offering developed by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) in its production network, the first deployment of its kind, according to those involved in the project. DDBR is an operator-driven initiative developed by TIP's Open Optical and Transport (OOPT) Project Group that defines the requirements of an open and disaggregated solution for core routing applications such as provider backbone and peering.

Google has flicked the switch on a local cloud region for Israel, Reuters reports. The move forms part of the Nimbus project Israel signed with Google and Amazon Web Services back in May 2021; AWS is expected to activate its cloud region in the country during the first half of next year, the report adds.

Sparkle, the international services arm of Telecom Italia (TIM), has won the "Best Subsea Innovation" gong at the Global Carrier Awards for its Genoa landing platform. The platform features a multi-duct underwater installation known as a "bore pipe," which allows for the safe landing of eight different ables.

Engineers from Openreach, the semi-autonomous network access arm of BT, have brought full-fiber broadband to the residents of Lindisfarne, the island that twice a day is physically disconnected from the UK mainland when the tide comes in. Figure 2: Full-fiber broadband reaches the Holy Island: It's what the monks would have wanted.
(Source: Openreach)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading