Eurobites: Telefónica Awards 5G Core to Huawei – Report

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: BT Ireland trials 1.2Tbit/s transmission with Huawei; TIM and Open Fiber are daggers drawn; Deutsche Telekom enables "holographic annotation" for field service engineers.In what could be seen as another slap in the perma-tanned face for the Trump administration, Telefónica has awarded the construction of its Spanish 5G core network to the Chinese vendor, according to Spanish business daily Expansion. However, the report adds that Telefónica will buy a second core from a different vendor in 2020, from Ericsson, Nokia or one of the newer US suppliers such as Affirmed or Mavenir. Telefónica already uses Huawei gear in its 4G network. (See Trump is losing the European war against Huawei.)Also putting work Huawei's way is BT Ireland: The pair have been carrying out 1.2Tbit/s transmission trials based on what Huawei says is a commercial product platform in a live network. The project uses Huawei-developed OptiXtreme series chips and high-performance optical transmission modules to facilitate ultra-high-speed interconnection between two Dublin data centers.Italian broadband rivals Telecom Italia (TIM) and Open Fiber have been engaging in a spot of handbags-at-dawn, with TIM's CEO Luigi Gubitosi accusing Open Fiber of building "fiber to nowhere," and Open Fiber responding that TIM's plans to buy the state-backed network operator were inconsistent with competition rules. As Reuters reports, Open Fiber has won a hat-trick of public tenders to rollout a high-speed broadband network in Italy's so-called non-viable areas. (See Eurobites: Italy's Open Fiber Secures €3.5B Loan for Mega-Rollout and Telecom Italia in Broadband Clash With Govt – Reports.)Deutsche Telekom believes there's money to be made in augmented reality: It has joined forces with chipmaker Qualcomm, mapping company 6D.ai and AR glasses maker Nreal to trial a system that offers better remote support to field service technicians. AR FieldAdvisor, which has been put through its paces at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, is described as a "spatial computing solution" that allows "remote experts" to "holographically annotate on the real world." Come again? Well, the field technician puts on his or her Nreal Light glasses and plugs them into a Snapdragon 5G-enabled smartphone, allowing the remote expert possibly hundreds of miles away to see what the inexpert field technician sees and advise accordingly, making holographic annotations directly on the surfaces of objects seen through the eyes of the technician.Polish mobile operator Play has turned to ADVA's Oscilloquartz timing system to provide LTE Advanced services throughout Poland and prepare its network for 5G. According to ADVA, the OSA 5405 Series offering will allow Play to migrate its radio access network from "costly" GNSS RF antennas and coax cables to standard copper and fiber Ethernet cabling, thereby reducing capex and opex.— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading