Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Deutsche Telekom's honeypots highlight hacker horrorshow; Ericsson sets up 5G hub in Moscow.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

May 22, 2019

3 Min Read
Eurobites: EE Gets to 5G First, Drops Huawei 5G Phones

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Deutsche Telekom's honeypots highlight hacker horrorshow; Ericsson sets up 5G hub in Moscow.

  • EE, the BT-owned mobile operator, will notch up a UK first when it launches 5G service in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester on May 30. Later this year, 5G will also be switched on in Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, with several more cities lined up for a 2020 launch. The first phase of the rollout will deploy the "non-standalone" variant of 5G, which piggy-backs on 4G, and it will not be until 2022 that a "full next generation 5G core network" will be introduced. As for devices, smartphones from Samsung, Oppo and One Plus will all be made available on 5G plans, but it seems that in the wake of Google's bowing to the US government's wishes and severing technology ties with Huawei, EE is dropping the Huawei Mate 20 x 5G phone (and other Huawei models) from its 5G range, for the moment at least, despite enthusiastically promoting it to 5G early adopters only last week. Speaking at a press conference this morning, EE's CEO, Marc Allera, said: "We have put Huawei devices on pause until there is more information on that -- this is an industry that is adaptive and you have to react -- until we have long-term assurance that customers will be supported, we have put the devices on pause."

    • Deutsche Telekom is highlighting the exponential growth in the number of hacks out there in the cybersphere, as if we needed reminding. The German giant set up various "honeypots," sort of digital traps on the Internet, which lured hackers to do their worst. And did they ever: On average there were 31 million attacks per day last month on these honeypots, compared with 12 million a day a year earlier. Deutsche Telekom analyses these attacks and tries to use what it learns to make its own systems, and those of its customers, more secure.

    • Ericsson has opened a 5G innovation hub at its head office in Moscow, where service providers can test out their 5G-related offerings in a Russian context.

    • BT is playing Lady Bountiful again with its TV soccer rights, allowing those without a BT Sport subscription to tune into both the UEFA Champions League final and the UEFA Europa League final -- which somehow feature four English teams between them -- via YouTube. Both finals take place next week. (See Confirmed: BT's Got Euroballs.)

    • French telecoms regulator Arcep is still banking on a 5G network launch in 2020, despite the current travails of Huawei, which could force some French operators to look elsewhere for their gear, Reuters reports.

    • UK service provider TalkTalk is in trouble for failing to tell 4,545 customers that their personal details were among those stolen in the company's massive 2015 data breach, the BBC reports. (See TalkTalk Plummets on Security Woes and Eurobites: TalkTalk Rocked by Cyber Attack.)

    • Belgium's Proximus has officially launched its fiber rollout in the city of Vilvoorde, with the first connections scheduled for later this year. In 2016 Proximus announced a ten-year €3 billion (US$3.35 billion) investment in fiber, and it is already digging trenches in nine cities. (See Eurobites: Proximus Invests €3B in Fiber Frenzy.)

    • Israel's ECI has added a virtualized SD-WAN offering to its Muse software suite, providing, says the vendor, a cheaper alternative to VPNs for enterprises that can run alongside a variety of other virtual network functions, on any commercial, off-the-shelf uCPE hardware.

      — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Paul Rainford

Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

Paul is based on the Isle of Wight, a rocky outcrop off the English coast that is home only to a colony of technology journalists and several thousand puffins.

He has worked as a writer and copy editor since the age of William Caxton, covering the design industry, D-list celebs, tourism and much, much more.

During the noughties Paul took time out from his page proofs and marker pens to run a small hotel with his other half in the wilds of Exmoor. There he developed a range of skills including carrying cooked breakfasts, lying to unwanted guests and stopping leaks with old towels.

Now back, slightly befuddled, in the world of online journalism, Paul is thoroughly engaged with the modern world, regularly firing up his VHS video recorder and accidentally sending text messages to strangers using a chipped Nokia feature phone.

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