Eurobites: Telecom Italia trials XGS-PONEurobites: Telecom Italia trials XGS-PON

In related matters, TIM has sealed a deal with streaming service DAZN, allowing it to show DAZN's full catalogue of live and on-demand sports content for the next three years, most notably Serie A soccer matches, on its TIMvision TV platform. DAZN acquired the rights to ten Serie A matches per day for the 2021-2024 seasons, seven of them exclusive.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Kan, is promising to furnish commuters (remember those?) on the city's underground train network with 4G as a major plank of his re-election campaign, the Financial Times reports (paywall applies). The issue of mobile phone coverage on the London Underground has been much discussed over the years, but debates over funding and technical considerations have largely stymied progress, the report adds.

Is retail industry veteran Ian Cheshire in pole position for the job of BT chairman following the resignation of Jan du Plessis? That's the possibility being explored by an interview in the Telegraph (paywall applies), in which Cheshire, already on the BT board, confirms that he is very much up for the chairman's role. In his eyes, BT is at an "extraordinary inflection point," with a lot of the "headwinds" that had buffeted the company having, he believes, blown themselves out. (See Eurobites: Jan du Plessis to step down as BT chairman and Boardroom bust-up brewing over Jansen's BT plans.)

UK Research and Innovation, a publicly funded body that seeks to encourage innovative solutions to technological challenges, is offering two or three projects a share of up to £6 million (US$8.3 million) if they can come up with ways of enhancing the central hardware and software of a computer so they can help block the issues responsible for up to 70% of today's cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The Digital Security by Design (DSbD) program is open to UK businesses and academics, and details can be found here.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading