The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has approved Cellnex Telecom's acquisition of CK Hutchison's 6,000 passive telecom infrastructure sites in the UK, subject to the divestment of around 1,000 of Cellnex's existing UK sites that overlap geographically with the CK Hutchison sites to be acquired. This is the final element of a program announced in November 2020 for Cellnex to acquire CK Hutchison's circa 24,600 sites in six European countries. (See Cellnex eyes Germany next, in towers buying spree and A Cellnex mutation could upend European telecom.)

This year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona attracted more than 61,000 masked-up attendees from almost 200 countries to view the wares of and chew the fat with more than 1,900 exhibitors, according to the event's organizer, the GSMA. It's still got some way to go to get back to pre-pandemic levels – 109,000 attended in 2019 – but the feeling from the show floor seems to be that MWC is very much back in business.

Sky is to launch mobile services in Ireland next year, using Vodafone's network. Vodafone says its Irish network provides more than 99% 4G population coverage for voice, data and text.

Elsewhere on planet Vodafone, the Vodafone Foundation and Imperial College London are teaming up to model the impact of climate change on tropical cyclones through the use of the DreamLab crowdsourcing app, which gives the boffins a hand by using the processing power of dormant smartphones while users charge them at night. With almost 2 million downloads across 17 countries to date, the network of smartphones created by DreamLab is, says Vodafone, equivalent to a virtual supercomputer capable of processing billions of calculations without collecting or disclosing any user data.

UK altnet CityFibre has signed a multi-million-pound deal with STL, an integrator of digital networks. STL will supply CityFibre with high-fiber-count Celesta Intelligently Bonded Ribbon (IBR) cables with Stellar bend-insensitive fiber and ribbon optimized joint enclosures. CityFibre is currently in the throes of a £4 billion (US$5.3 billion) investment program to roll out full-fiber infrastructure to up to 8 million UK homes by 2025.

A private 5G network has gone live at the port of Felixstowe, on England's North Sea coast. The project is a collaboration between Three UK, Blue Mesh Solutions and the University of Cambridge, and received grant funding from the 5G Testbeds and Trials program run by UK government.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading