BT has agreed to sell its Irish wholesale/enterprise unit, BTCIL, to Speed Fibre Group in a deal that values BTCIL at €22 million (US$23 million). The sale includes BT's domestic network infrastructure, more than 400 customers and associated teams supporting wholesale and business enterprises. It does not, however, include BTCIL's customer base of multinationals and large Irish organizations, the emergency call answering service or the recently divested data center business. The deal also features a long-term agreement between the two parties to source connectivity for their respective customers from each other. Speed Fiber Group is owned by Cordiant Digital Infrastructure, a global infrastructure investor. Bas Burger, the outgoing CEO of BT Business, described the deal as "another key milestone in focusing our international business on what it does best: providing secure multi-cloud connectivity to large organizations globally and in Ireland."
Four more years for Nokia and Orange France
Nokia has extended its 5G radio access network (RAN) contract with Orange France for another four years, covering Orange's network footprint in southeastern and western France. Nokia will supply baseband offerings from its AirScale range, massive MIMO Habrok radios and its Pandion FDD multiband remote radio heads, among other goodies. Orange will also trial Nokia's 5G cloud RAN technology.
Across the Channel, Nokia has been jointly testing what is claimed to be the UK's first live 50Gbit/s broadband connection in partnership with Openreach, BT's semi-autonomous network access unit. The field test was conducted from a residential property in the town of Ipswich, run over a section of Openreach's existing full-fiber network, with download speeds hitting 41.9 Gbit/s and uploads reaching 20.6 Gbit/s. Simultaneous tests of the service were carried out over a trial XGS-PON network.
Sparkle's BlueMed surfaces in Cyprus
Sparkle, Telecom Italia's international unit, has struck a deal with Cypriot operator Cyta to land Sparkle's BlueMed cable in Cyprus. BlueMed, which is part of the Blue & Raman subsea cable systems built in partnership with Google and others, connects Italy with France, Greece and several other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Under the terms of the agreement, Sparkle will create a branch of BlueMed to Cyta's landing station in Yeroskipos.
Hayo helps connect African diaspora
Hayo has agreed to provide wholesale voice minutes to calling-app provider Talk360 to help African diaspora around the world connect. Call credits can be purchased from Talk360 in a range of local currencies, and more than 200 payment methods are supported by its point-of-sale network in South Africa.
Proximus updates STPs
Belgium's Proximus has teamed up with BroadForward and Nomios to replace its legacy hardware-based signaling transfer points (STPs) with BroadForward's software-based STP offering. Despite the gradual phase-out of Proximus' 3G network, STPs remain important for supporting roaming, messaging, IoT applications, VoLTE signaling and emergency services, says Proximus.
Crnogorski Telekom's billing heads for the cloud
Montenegro's Crnogorski Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, is to upgrade its billing systems with the help of Amdocs. The systems will be migrated to Amdocs' latest cloud-based version of its software.
More roaming for Mobily with iBasis
Saudi operator Mobily has renewed its roaming services partnership with Tier 1 IPX network iBasis. The two companies have been working together for more than a decade.
Sounding good for Spotify
Spotify, the Sweden-based audio-streaming giant, is celebrating its first full year of profitability, achieving an operating income in 2024 of €477 million ($497 million). Its number of paying (or "Premium") customers increased 11% year-over-year to 263 million, a figure the company expects to reach 265 milllion in Q1 2025.