Eurobites: BT and Nokia trial 5G RedCap tech for IoT devices

BT, Nokia and MediaTek say they have successfully completed trials of 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) technology, using EE's 5G standalone network, Nokia's AirScale RAN products and MediaTek's RedCap testing platform. RedCap was introduced in 3GPP Release 17 and is intended to bring a stripped-down, energy-efficient form of 5G to small IoT devices such as wearables or environmental sensors, which have less demand for battery life and lower bandwidth requirements than, say, smartphones.

London-based Freshwave has teamed up with NEC on a project to provide a dense urban area of the UK capital with a multi-operator, neutral host small cell offering based on NEC's Open vRAN software. The aim of the project is to demonstrate that such a set-up is more cost-effective and energy-efficient compared to legacy single-RAN networks The £7.4 million (US$9 million) scheme, Project NAVIGATE (Neutral host Architecture Validation Innovates Globally Applicable Telecoms Enablers), is just one of 19 projects selected for development as part of the UK government's Open Networks Ecosystem (ONE) competition. The government will contribute £3.32 million ($4 million) and the remainder will be invested by NEC and Freshwave.

Telecom Italia (TIM) has received KKR's binding bid for Netco, TIM's domestic fixed access network though, as Reuters reports, the investment fund says it needs more time to finalize its bid for TIM's smaller subsea division, Sparkle. According to Reuters' sources, KKR's bid was in excess of €23 billion ($24.2 billion). (See TIM starts exclusive talks with KKR over fixed assets.)

Liberty Global has acquired all of the shares it didn't already own in Belgian cable operator Telenet for roughly $1 billion, 11 years after a similar attempted maneuver came to nothing. Liberty Global has been Telenet's controlling shareholder since February 2007. (See Liberty Global's latest Telenet play should stick the landing.)

Dish, the US pay-TV provider, has sued BritBox, the UK video streaming service backed by public service broadcasters the BBC and ITV, for allegedly infringing patents relating to adaptive bitrate streaming, the technology which adjusts streaming quality based on available bandwidth. As Reuters reports, Dish has form on this, having previously sued other companies – online fitness platform Peloton among them – for patent infringement.

Ericsson has been rated as the top digital wallet vendor by Juniper Research, seeing off competition from the likes of Comviva and Huawei. The Ericsson Wallet Platform is a tool for telcos and financial service providers that supports more than 400 million registered mobile wallets and processes more than 2.8 billion transactions a month across 24 countries.