Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Slovak Telekom goes with Netcracker for billing; DT teams up with Fraunhofer for IoT; Intracom backhauls video in Warsaw.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

November 21, 2017

3 Min Read
Eurobites: Liberty Global Looks to Get In On UK IT Services Action

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Slovak Telekom goes with Netcracker for billing; DT teams up with Fraunhofer for IoT; Intracom backhauls video in Warsaw.

  • US-based cable giant Liberty Global Inc. (Nasdaq: LBTY) has signed a deal with MXC Capital, a tech investment company, to create a "buy-and-build" IT services business that will target small and midsized firms in the UK. As The Register reports, the joint venture will look to make a series of acquisitions to create "an enterprise of size and scale" -- one which may itself in time be acquired by Liberty Global-owned Virgin Media Inc. (Nasdaq: VMED), predicts The Register.

    • Slovak Telekom , a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT), has gone with Netcracker Technology Corp. 's Revenue Management software for managing the billing of its residential and home-office customers. The move has enabled the operator to "converge" its fixed and mobile billing onto one system, thereby saving money and improving its "business agility," according to the US vendor.

    • Deutsche Telekom has joined forces with the Fraunhofer-Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML in Dortmund, Germany to set up the Telekom Open IoT Labs, dedicated, as its name suggests, to developing systems for the Internet of Things, particularly ones relating to the manufacturing, logistics and aviation sectors. The labs will be open to other companies interesting in collaborating with Deutsche Telekom on IoT projects.

    • Greece's Intracom Telecom has landed a video surveillance backhaul deal in Warsaw, supplying ZOSM with point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless systems to address the backhaul needs of its high-definition video surveillance network in the Polish capital.

    • Hetzner Online, a German web hosting provider and data center operator, has deployed ADVA Optical Networking 's FSP 3000 CloudConnect data center interconnect (DCI) offering to boost the capacity of its backbone network to 400 Gbit/s and beyond. The upgrade involved the use of pairs of 200Gbit/s connections operating at 16QAM, and allows the transportation of 400Gbit/s data loads over distances of up to 250km without the need for signal regeneration, says ADVA.

    • Swedish video tech specialist Edgeware AB has named Karl Thedéen as its incoming CEO, starting in February 2018. He will replace founder Joachim Roos, who is stepping down after 14 years at the helm. Thedéen joins from optical transport specialist Infinera, where he is currently head of the Metro Business Group. He joined Infinera in 2015 when it acquired Swedish transport vendor Transmode, where Thedéen was head honcho. (See Thedéen Takes CEO Role at Edgeware, Infinera-Transmode Closing Imminent; Karl's in Charge... of Metro and Infinera Makes $350M Offer for Sweden's Transmode.)

    • France's Witbe , which specializes in test and monitoring, has teamed up with Divitel, a Netherlands-based systems integrator focusing on video and TV, to offer managed testing and monitoring services for broadcasters, operators and OTT providers in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

      — 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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