Nokia's Nuage Networks is teaming up with Ireland-based Asavie to use the latter's SD Edge, described as a "self-serve mobile SD-WAN," to extend the reach of Nuage's own SD-WAN 2.0 offering. The new, improved product will allow users, says Nokia, to "securely connect to enterprise clouds and applications without the hassle of using VPN clients on their devices."

Elsewhere in Nokialand, the vendor has found a home for its OZO audio technology in the latest range of smartphones from China's OnePlus. OZO features include Audio Windscreen, which, according to Nokia, "dramatically" reduces wind distortion in the audio and Audio Zoom, which allows users to "dynamically identify and amplify sounds to correspond with zoomed and magnified video."

Orange has pronounced that its new cable survey ship, the Urbano Monti, is ready to set sail and start work, her first job being in the Mediterranean Sea for ASN. The operator acquired the ship through its fully owned Italian subsidiary, Elettra tlc, in September 2019.

Turkcell has turned to Affirmed Networks' service orchestration/automation platform and its virtualized Wi-Fi gateway to help it introduce new revenue-generating services faster. Turkcell and Affirmed began their virtualization relationship three years ago, when the operator deployed a unified network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) that, in theory, allowed it to wave goodbye to its clunky legacy networks.

Possibly emboldened by the thinking-out-loud of their spiritual leader, TV sofa-botherer Eamonn Holmes, nitwits damaged a further 20 phone masts in the UK over the long Easter weekend as they sought to protect the populace from 5G's, erm, coronavirus-generating death rays. As the BBC reports, one of the sites targeted provides connectivity to a hospital in Birmingham on the frontline of the struggle against COVID-19. Doh!

Colt Technology Services has launched PrizmNet Cloud Access, which allows participants in the financial world's capital markets to take advantage of a choice of cloud platforms and the applications they provide.

London-based Truphone has secured £30 million (US$37.5 million) from existing investors in funding to help it develop its eSIM software offerings. The company provisioned its first eSIM in September 2018, and now claims to have provisioned over 4 million eSIM profiles globally to consumer and IoT devices.

Stay safe. Stay home. Watch the telly. UK cable operator Virgin Media reports that nearly 4 million views of programs on its on-demand platform were notched up over the "lockdown Easter weekend," with the performing pooches and death-defying dance troupes of Britain's Got Talent proving the strongest draw of the non-BBC fare. (For some reason, Virgin Media does not have access to data related to programs watched via the BBC iPlayer app, so BBC content is not included in its analysis.)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading