The seafaring city of Plymouth, in the south-west of England, is to be home to what its backers say is the world's first 5G ocean-based marine testbed. Smart Sound Connect, as the project is called, will be available to eligible businesses to test 5G-fueled applications such as smart shipping and environmental monitoring using IoT technology. It will use a private 5G network built by Vodafone using Nokia equipment and the vendor's Digital Automation Cloud platform, which is capable of providing high-bandwidth, "hyper-fast" private networking and edge computing capabilities. The £4.5 million (US$5.9 million) project is supported by the European Regional Development Fund, amongst others. Figure 1: Plymouth Sound: 5G marine testbed ahoy!
(Source: EU European Regional Development Fund)

TMCEL Mozambique and Ericsson have signed a five-year deal to upgrade TMCEL's systems through the use of Ericsson's business support systems (BSS) and mobile money software. The use of mobile-money platforms in Africa has soared during the pandemic, partly as a result of transaction fees being reduced by some operators. For more details, see this story on our sister site, Connecting Africa.

Drones and robots loom large in the top ten startups selected by the judges of Swisscom's Startup Challenge, which this year focused specifically on 5G applications and was open to teams from anywhere in the world, as opposed to just Switzerland. For more information on the companies who have made it this far, click here. Be sure to check out the enthusiasm of the man in the AC-DC t-shirt from Hegias.

Prysmian, the Italy-based cable systems company, has filed legal proceedings for patent infringement in the UK High Court against Emtelle. Prysmian claims that Emtelle's FibreFlow products infringe two of its European patents – EP (UK) 1,420,279 B1 and EP (UK) 1,668,392 B1, – for fiber-optic cables.

The Nokia Foundation has given its 2020 Recognition Award to Mikko Möttönen, a professor of quantum technology at Aalto University, for his contributions to the field of quantum computing. One of the applications of quantum computing is QKD (quantum key distribution) technology, a technique for sharing encryption keys between locations using a stream of single photons which some of its backers rashly describe as "unhackable."

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading