Eurobites: Ericsson & Telecom Italia Top 20 Gbit/s Over 28GHz in 5G Demo

BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) and Sky have agreed to supply each other with their respective TV sports channels, with Sky receiving a wholesale supply of BT Sport channels and a BT Sport app being made available on the Sky's pay-as-you-go Now TV streaming service. Sky will make its Now TV service, which includes its sports channels, available on the BT TV set-top box. It seems a surprising move, given Sky and BT's fierce rivalry in the bidding war for the rights to premium sports coverage -- and especially coverage of English Premier League soccer. The new services, however, won't be available until early 2019. (See BT Splashes $1.5B to Beat Sky in Latest Soccer Rights Battle and BT's Bogeyman: A Soccer-Mad Amazon.)

A senior officer in the UK military has warned of "potentially catastrophic" consequences if the newly modernized Russian navy decided to cut subsea communications cables. As the BBC reports, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach said that the vulnerability of such lines represented a "new risk to our way of life" and called on Nato to make their protection a priority. Figure 1: "He's either catching haddock or unplugging the Internet – it's hard to see from here."

Switzerland's Sunrise Communications AG has also been demonstrating the potential of 5G, in this case with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd , using various virtual reality and video applications to make its point. The demo took place at Sunrise's headquarters in Zurich, achieving download speeds of up to 3.28 Gbit/s, which Huawei claims is the fastest ever measured for a mobile Internet link with 3.5GHz.

Spotify , the Swedish music streaming service that still outranks similar offerings from the likes of Apple and Amazon, has seen its value grow by around 20% in the last few months as it approaches a potential stock market listing in the first half of 2018, according to a Reuters report. Last week Spotify and its Chinese equivalent, Tencent, bought minority stakes in each other.

A British security research firm has discovered that the "smart" heating systems installed in a number of UK schools are very vulnerable to being hacked. As the BBC reports, Pen Test Partners says that in such cases the equipment's controllers have been connected to the "wider Internet," against the recommendations of the manufacturer.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading