Telia Company has agreed to sell 49% of its tower business in Sweden to investment companies Brookfield and Alecta for 5.5 billion Swedish kroner (US$581 million). The deal follows a similar one last year, where Telia sold a portion of its tower business in Norway and Finland to the same two companies. Alecta is a pension fund; Brookfield an infrastructure fund. According to Allison Kirkby, Telia's company president and CEO, the deal is part of a "clear strategy to develop and crystalize its digital infrastructure by joining forces with strategic partners that have a similar long-term view of the value of these assets."

Eir has reached an agreement with InfraVia Capital Partners to form a joint venture dedicated to the deployment of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology across Ireland. InfraVia has taken a 49.99% interest in the new entity, Fibre Networks Ireland, with Eir retaining the remaining 50.01%. Eir is hoping to reach 1.9 million premises with FTTH by the end of 2026.

Nokia has announced that its Core Networks business has plumped for AMD's third-generation EPYC processors to power the servers that deliver cloud-native software products. The Finnish vendor is targeting up to a 40% reduction in server power consumption to run core workloads using the new chips.

A boat travels more than 1,000 nautical miles with no one steering… no it's not the familiar legend of the Mary Celeste, but instead an autonomous tugboat being "sailed" via 4G roaming connectivity provided by Vodafone. The tugboat, named Nellie Bly, docked in the Port of Hamburg after a 13-day journey along the east coast of Denmark. Boston-based Sea Machines provided the boat's command-and-control system, allowing landlocked sea dogs to control the tug from over 13,000 miles away. Figure 1: There's no one driving: The tugboat Nellie Bly docked in the Port of Hamburg after a 13-day autonomous journey along the east coast of Denmark.
(Source: Vodafone/Sea Machines)

Telefónica has been praised for its "respect for human rights, promotion of decent work and ethical conduct" by an outfit called the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), which has ranked the telco as the Spanish company "most committed to people development." One area which drew special praise was Telefónica's commitment to "fostering socio-economic progress through mobile broadband connectivity to unconnected and/or poorly connected areas in rural areas and contributing to bridging the so-called digital divide through more accessible technology and digital skills education."

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading