Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: CityFibre goes private following acquisition; Orange offers Earth data; copyright rules may get tougher for FANG gang.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

June 22, 2018

2 Min Read
Eurobites: Ericsson, MTN Put the Skids Under 5G

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: CityFibre goes private following acquisition; Orange offers Earth data; copyright rules may get tougher for FANG gang.

  • Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) and MTN Group Ltd. have combined on what they say is Africa's first "use case" to demonstrate 5G mobility, achieving more than 1.6 Gbit/s data throughput on 100MHz TDD spectrum with 5ms latency in a moving vehicle. The demonstration took place on a skid pan in Pretoria, South Africa, with the audience able to view a live feed of what the driver was seeing from the car as it careered around the track. In the second part of the demo, the driver's windscreen was obscured, leaving him to navigate the track from a live feed from a 4K video camera to his virtual reality headset. Four radio units, baseband equipment and a 5G user equipment prototype were all used in the demo.

    • UK altnet CityFibre has delisted from the AIM, the London Stock Exchange's international market for smaller, growing companies, following the completion of its acquisition by the Goldman Sachs-backed Connect Infrastructure Bidco. It is hoped that the acquisition will help CityFibre accelerate its fiber rollout, which is scheduled to reach 1 million homes by 2021. (See CityFibre Delists as Acquisition Closes and Eurobites: Investment Group Makes £538M Bid for CityFibre.)

    • Orange Business Services has teamed up with Airbus and Capgemini to launch a new service that uses Orange's secure public cloud to allow the public to access observational data about the Earth collated by the European Space Agency's Copernicus program. It's called Sobloo, and you can watch a nice video of it here.

    • A European Parliament committee has voted for tougher copyright rules, which could make life more difficult for the online giants such as Google, forcing them to share revenues with publishers and take the rap for copyright infringement on the Internet. As Reuters reports, the vote, by the Legal Affairs Committee, is likely to become the European Parliament's official position on the issue in future negotiations with member states.

    • Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT) is trumpeting the fact that it's recently commissioned around 300 new basestations as it puts 163,000 customers within reach of LTE and extends its LTE population coverage to 94.4%.

      — 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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