Eurobites: Orange chooses Equinix for telco cloud boostEurobites: Orange chooses Equinix for telco cloud boost

Former Ericsson man Emanuele Iannetti has been appointed CEO of the newly incorporated company set up by Telecom Italia (TIM), Leonardo, CDP and Sogei to oversee the design, construction and management of Italy's National Strategic Hub infrastructure for the provision of cloud services to the Italian state.

Dutch incumbent operator KPN has launched SD-WAN Premium, a service which, says the company, makes it easier for large companies to stay in control of their networks by allowing separate networks to be managed by one overarching service.

WightFibre, the company that has been busy digging trenches across the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast, claims to it is the first UK operator to switch off its copper network. WightFibre has been operating a hybrid fiber-coaxial network (HFC) network on the Isle of Wight since 2001 but in 2018 WightFibre began the rollout of a new full-fiber network across the island. The company says that for most islanders the migration away from copper was "seamless," although a few rotary-dial telephones and ageing alarm systems could not handle the brave new world of fiber.

Ericsson and Nokia were among a number of Western technology companies announcing plans on Monday for a complete withdrawal from Russia, according to a Reuters report. Last week US laptop giant Dell became the latest big name to announce that it was getting the hell out of Putin's kingdom.

BT says its TV customers equipped with a BT TV Box Pro can now go aerial-free, should they so desire. When a customer sets up his or her BT TV Box Pro for the first time, they’ll be given the option in the set-up process to either connect via "Internet mode" or "aerial mode." But is ditching the aerial good for the planet or your electricity bill? A study carried out by the BBC in 2020 found that viewing over streaming, cable and satellite platforms used a mean of 0.15-0.19kWh per device-hour (78-98 gCO2e) while terrestrial broadcast used a mean of 0.06kWh (31 gCO2e). Discuss.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading