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AT&T struggles to defend open cloudiness of Ericsson deal
More than a year into the Ericsson-led rollout, there is very little evidence AT&T's radio access network is as multivendor and virtualized as the telco makes out.
Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Telxius upgrades Carrier Ethernet service, with Ciena's help; PoP goes the Balkans; Brit bosses ahead of the GenAI uptake game.
Finland's Elisa is planning to hire up to 100 AI and software experts over the next 12 months to work at its domestic and Estonian units. The company says it is looking in particular for "people who know technology and who also understand business," candidates that are able to "see the business value that code is enabling." Elisa has long prided itself on being more than just an operator; it is heavily into network automation and as long ago as 2018 was claiming that its network operations center was run entirely by machines. (See Finland's Elisa bucks trend of telco decline.)
Telefónica-owned Telxius has upgraded its Global Carrier Ethernet (GCE) service, providing new bandwidth options for businesses in the Americas and Europe. The service, powered by Ciena technology, offers speeds ranging from 50 Mbit/s to more than 100 Gbit/s. It is supported by a global network spanning more than 100,000km of subsea and terrestrial backhaul connections throughout Europe, the US and Latin America.
In related news, Telefónica's shares fell by around 3% on Monday following the removal of former CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete over the weekend. As Reuters reports (paywall applies), Álvarez-Pallete was replaced by Marc Murtra, head of defense company Indra, following an intervention by SEPI, a state fund that owns a 10% stake in the operator.
London-headquartered RETN has established its first point of presence (PoP) in Greece, located at the Balkan Gate Data Centre in Thessaloniki. The new PoP, says the company, adds an important link to RETN's pan-Eurasian network, bridging the Balkans and the Mediterranean, and establishing a protected wavelength route that connects to RETN's DWDM backbone in Sofia, its major hub in the region.
Kenyan operator Safaricom has hooked up with two fund managers – Standard Investment Bank and ALA Capital – to launch Ziidi MMF, a money market fund geared to the needs of users of mobile wallet platform M-Pesa. Ziidi MMF is a unit trust enabling customers to earn interest by investing funds from their M-Pesa wallet into the Ziidi account, with interest being accrued daily. (See M-Pesa remains Safaricom's most profitable service.)
Britain's CEOs are ahead of their peers elsewhere when it comes to their companies adopting generative AI (GenAI) – but translating this into greater profits is another matter. That's the conclusion of consultancy PwC's 28th Annual Global CEO Survey. Nine in ten UK bosses say their businesses have adopted GenAI "to some extent," more than double the equivalent number in the same survey published last year. However, just 36% of them believe GenAI will increase profitability in the next 12 months, compared with 49% of global CEOs. (See AI enters 2025 as the biggest charlatan of tech.)
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