Dominique Leroy, the former boss of Belgian's Proximus who was the subject of a police investigation over the suspicious-looking sale of Proximus shares just weeks before she quit her job, has been appointed Deutsche Telekom's now board member for Europe, succeeding Srini Gopalan. Leroy had been lined up for a lucrative post-Proximus role at KPN, but the Dutch operator withdrew its job offer on hearing about the Belgian share-sale probe.

The UK government has launched a National Data Strategy, which it hopes will "drive growth, boost innovation, create new jobs and improve public services." The main plank of the plan seems to be the training up of 500 data analysts across the public sector by 2021. Depressingly perhaps, given all that is going on in a coronavirus-clobbered world, one of the chief benefits cited is giving people "the power to use their own data to find better tariffs in areas such as telecoms, energy and pensions." That'll help.

Sky, the UK-based pay-TV giant, has added music-streaming service ROXi to its Sky Q set-top box. ROXi offers more than 55 million songs, interactive music trivia games, karaoke-style shenanigans and playlists from the likes of Robbie Williams. Figure 1: Stand down guys: art-house popsters Roxy Music, not to be confused with ROXi music, Sky Q's most recent addition.
(Source: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands)

AegiQ, an unpronounceable UK quantum photonics startup, has secured £1.4 million (US$1.8 million) in funding from government agency Innovate UK to help it develop secure quantum communications technology for fibre-optic and satellite based applications.

Removing Huawei from the UK's 5G networks by 2027 risks severely delaying operators' 5G rollout plans, denting the UK economy to the tune of £18.2 billion ($23.5 billion) and losing the UK's competitive advantage in 5G leadership. That, at least, is the view of a report from analyst firm Assembly commissioned by… Huawei! The full report can be downloaded here. (See Huawei banned from UK's 5G market and Eurobites: UK told Huawei the 5G ban is partly political – report.)

The Vodafone Foundation is pumping $28 million into the expansion of its M-Mama ambulance taxi program beyond Tanzania, taking it to Lesotho and a number of other sub-Saharan African countries. M-Mama uses a combination of mobile technology and mobile money system M-Pesa to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality rates. In Tanzania, says the Vodafone Foundation, M-Mama has helped reduce maternal mortality by 27%.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading