Cellnex is also said to be one of the companies showing interest in buying masts being sold by UK mobile operator Three, according to a Telegraph report. The report, which cites unnamed industry sources, says Three is hoping to raise money to help prepare the ground for a merger with a rival operator. (See Cellnex emerges as Euro mobile tower power player.)

In other towers-related news, Telecom Italia (TIM) and Ardian have finalized the details of their shared investment in Inwit, which was first announced in June. The deal consists of the purchase by a consortium of institutional investors led by Ardian of a 49% stake in Daphne 3, a newly established holding company controlled by TIM, to which TIM has transferred a 30.2% stake in the share capital of Inwit.

MTN Zambia has signed a partnership deal with China's ZTE to construct a cross-border optical transmission network backbone to connect Lusaka, Zambia's capital, to the Namibian border. MTN hopes the project will "break the bottleneck of the international egress traffic" and reduce the cost per megabyte of accessing Internet data.

GeoSpock, a UK-based startup whose thing is databases for heavy-duty analytics, has received an unspecified investment from Japan's NTT DoCoMo. GeoSpock offers GeoSpock DB, a platform that, the company says, can analyze more than a trillion records of ultra-large scale data at high speed with its proprietary algorithms and has been used in smart-city applications and the like.

Microsoft says it plans to invest in Greece's cloud services infrastructure, Reuters reports, bringing long-term benefits worth in the region of €1 billion (US$1.2 billion), according to the country's prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Openreach, the semi-autonomous network access arm of BT, is to stop selling copper-based products at another 51 exchange locations across the UK as it shifts its focus to fiber. This brings the total number of exchange locations where Openreach plans to stop selling legacy analogue services in the next 12 months to 169. (See Eurobites: Openreach Finally Puts 'Fibre First'.)

A "spin-out" from the UK's Cambridge University, Nu Quantum, has bagged £2.1 million ($2.7 billion) in funding for the development of its photonic quantum technology, the Daily Telegraph reports (paywall applies). Such technology can be used to strengthen encryption, making encrypted messages more secure. The latest funding has come from a number of backers, Amadeus Capital and IQ Capital among them.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading