Ericsson, Spotify and SAP are among a number of European firms and institutions that have signed a Meta-coordinated open letter asking the EU to provide a more consistent approach to regulatory decision-making in relation to AI. The signatories worry that if the regulators don't change their ways, Europe is going to miss out on "two cornerstones of AI innovation," namely the development of open AI models and "multimodal" models, the latter apparently representing a "leap forward" that allows for AI to operate fluidly across text, images and speech. "[But] in recent times," complains the letter, "regulatory decision making has become fragmented and unpredictable, while interventions by the European Data Protection Authorities have created huge uncertainty about what kinds of data can be used to train AI models. This means the next generation of open source AI models, and products, services we build on them, won't understand or reflect European knowledge, culture or languages."

French operator Free says it has become the country's first telco to offer 5G 3.5GHz standalone (5G SA) on its public network on a national scale, boasting 6,950 3.5GHz sites. With 5G SA, Free also claims it is the first operator in France to launch Voice over New Radio (VoNR), bringing, says Free, faster connection times, lower latency, better voice quality and less battery drain.

Austria's A1 has acquired the newly created Serbian company, Conexio Metro, a move which will allow it to offer convergent products on its own fiber network for its Serbian customers in 2025. Conexio Metro was spun off by Serbian provider Conexio, which remains an active company and is not the subject of the acquisition. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The Broadband Forum has launched a new project that it hopes will pave the way for the delivery of low latency in home broadband networks using Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable Throughput (L4S) technology. L4S, says the Forum, will enable service providers to offer services to subscribers that can support applications with high latency and capacity demands at the same time and at the same potential network bottleneck. It is envisaged that L4S will offer better user experiences for a range of applications including cloud gaming, video conferencing and extended reality.

Spanish towerco Cellnex is boosting 5G coverage on the Barcelona seafront to coincide with the ongoing America's Cup yacht race. A distributed mini-antenna system is providing 5G connectivity to the 3.5km of coastline running from Sant Sebastià beach to Mar Bella beach. The new infrastructure has been designed to remain in place once the America's Cup reaches its conclusion on October 27.

The EU's General Court has largely held up the €242 million (US$270 million) fine imposed on chip giant Qualcomm in 2019 by the European Commission for what was deemed predatory pricing – at rival Icera's expense – in relation to the supply of chips to Huawei and ZTE. In its judgment, the Court reduced the fine to €238.7 million ($266.4 million) but rejected all Qualcomm's points "in their entirety," with the exception of a plea comcerning the calculation of the amount of the fine, which it found to be "well founded in part."