Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Ericsson does 5G fast in the Faroe Islands; Telia explores 5G for healthcare; French government kills the phone fun.
BT is so impressed with what AWS has done for its internal systems since they announced an agreement last May that it's struck a new deal with the cloud giant that will see the pair collaborate on new, IoT-oriented cloud networking packages and 5G edge computing services for its UK business customers. And the two companies reckon there's a $500 million "revenue opportunity" to be extracted from such collaboration over the next five years. As part of the deal, BT becomes an official channel partner for AWS Marketplace. (See Eurobites: BT takes a chance on Amazon's cloud.)
(Source: Old Visuals/Alamy Stock Photo)
Ericsson is claiming to have achieved a European 5G millimeter wave downlink speed record of 5.9 Gbit/s – in the tricky terrain of the Faroe Islands, of all places. The technology is due to be deployed by Faroese Telecom across all of the self-governing nation's 18 islands. The speed tests were carried out on the commercial mobile network of Faroese Telecom in an indoor deployment using Ericsson's AIR 5322 and Baseband 6648 products alongside its carrier aggregation technology.
Sweden's Telia has installed a 5G testbed at an emergency hospital near Stockholm to explore how 5G services can be used to improved patient safety through better healthcare-related communication. The project was carried out with Region Stockholm, the body responsible for healthcare, public transport and regional development.
Aalborg University in Denmark has embarked on a 6G research project with Japanese company Anritsu looking at new techniques for channel sounding and communication channel sensing in new 6G frequency bands, including the millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz bands. Anritsu is supplying its vector network analyzers, while the university brings its antenna and measurement systems to the party.
Le fun: c'est fini. The French government has decided that its army of civil servants can no longer have "recreational" apps on their work phones, meaning that TikTok, Netflix, Instagram, Twitter and, yes, even Candy Crush, are now out of bounds. As the BBC reports, the ban will affect about 2.5 million civil servants.
Nokia has landed the contract to upgrade NTT Docomo's nationwide IP core backbone to enable so-called network slicing as it rolls out new 5G mobile services.
The use of pub Wi-Fi by the over-60s age demographic is on the rise in the UK, according to new research carried out by EvolveODM and pub chain Robinsons. Last year the number of these more mature drinkers logging on in-pub rose by 45% on 2019's pre-pandemic levels. Well, who wants to make conversation when you can check on the football scores every 30 seconds instead?
Ah, the mysterious allure of the velvet rope. Sky, the UK-based purveyor of pay-TV and more, is launching a new "VIP lounge experience" to reward some of its more needy customers with various freebies. The first such lounges will open at Leeds' First Direct arena, the Utilita Arena Birmingham and OVO Arena Wembley, offering pre-gig pampering to the, erm, lucky few.
— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading
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