Eurobites: Beeline joins medical boffins for AI diagnostics project

Ethiopia's government is nothing if not ambitious: It plans to develop a social media app to rival the combined might of Facebook Twitter, WhatsApp and Zoom, according to a Reuters report. The country's civil war has turned social media in Ethiopia into a particularly heated political battleground – with the government shutting down Facebook and WhatsApp on more than one occasion.

Welsh broadband provider Ogi has anointed Nokia as its "key technology partner," choosing kit from the Finnish vendor for its FTTx street cabinets serving both homes and businesses. The first three "active cabinets" containing Nokia gear will go live sometime this month.

In other Nokia news, the vendor has announced the launch of a scholarship program aimed at getting more people from under-represented communities into technology careers. Working in tandem with Udacity, a "talent transformation platform," and the Blacks In Technology (BIT) Foundation, Nokia will offer 300 such scholarships covering a range of core tech competencies, from cloud computing and programming to AI and data science.

Deutsche Telekom is supplying a 5G "campus network" to the Werner-von-Siemens Centre for Industry and Science currently being built in Berlin. It will be used to test 5G-based applications relating to autonomous production logistics, with the hope that successful ones will be able to be quickly transferred into the real, commercial world.

Raxio Group has tapped Master Power to manufacture and install its data centers in Africa. Following its first facility in Uganda, Raxio's next batch of data centers are being developed in Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique in order to deliver colocation services to the region.

UK converged operator Virgin Media O2 has added the suburban village in Ash Green, Warwickshire to its gigabit rollout. The more than 5,000 homes in Ash Green will be able to access average top speeds of 1,130 Mbit/s. The construction forms part of Virgin's "Project Lightning" network expansion program.

Meanwhile, in "no surprises here" corner, new data from TalkTalk reveals that Internet usage in Scotland over the last 18 coronavirus-riddled months has risen by a third. The research also reveals that an overwhelming 89% of office workers in Scotland hope to continue working from home in the future.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading