Eurobites: Ericsson, Telia showcase 5G private networks in the Baltics

Ericsson has switched on a 5G private network at its Supply Site manufacturing plant in Tallin, Estonia, a facility which accounts for nearly half of the company's new product launches. The network is the result of a collaboration with Telia, the Sweden-based mobile operator, and will enable cutting-edge technology such as real-time video analytics, digital twins and collaborative robotics. It will also be partly used to showcase what the introduction of 5G can do for other manufacturing businesses in the region. Figure 1: Look, no humans: Robots rule in Ericsson's 5G-controlled Tallinn plant.
(Source: Telia)

Vodafone UK is to start switching off its 3G network from next month, after what it says were successful switch-off pilots in the cities of Plymouth and Basingstoke earlier this year. Hull, Oxford and Greater London are next on the hit-list, before the shutdown progresses across the south of the UK. The remainder of the country will follow later in the year. The operator's 2G network, which currently covers over 99% of the UK population, will remain in place for calls and texts.

Telecom Italia (TIM) has secured another €360 million (US$395 million) loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB), which will used to fund the expansion of the company's 5G coverage – TIM plans to spread 5G across Italy by the end of 2025 using 700MHz bands. The EIB – a long-term lending institution under the control of the EU member states – has provided more than €1 billion ($1.09 billion) in financing for TIM projects between 2019 and 2023.

TIM has also struck a deal with ERG, an independent producer of electricity from renewable sources, for the supply of an additional 200 GWh/year of green energy for the period 2023-2031. This agreement means that approximately 34% of TIM's energy purchases will now come from renewable sources through power purchase agreements (PPAs), which help stabilize the price TIM must pay. TIM hopes to turn all of its energy supply green by 2025.

Mobile operator Three UK saw first-quarter revenues rise 5% year-over-year, to £610 million ($769 million), while margin rose by 7%, to £389 million ($491 million). Average revenue per user (ARPU) was also up slightly, from £12.96 ($16.35) last year to £13.05 ($16.46) this time around, while its active customer base rose 6%, to 10.3 million, thanks largely to the growth of its Smarty value brand and its B2B operations. However, contract churn grew from 1.1% to 1.4% due, says Three, to challenging economic conditions.

First-quarter revenues at Germany's ADVA climbed 5.2% year-over-year, to €179.4 million ($196.9 million), though they fell in sequential terms by 8.4% due, says ADVA, to delivery bottlenecks and reduced orders in its cloud access business. The vendor confirmed its guidance for the full year on the strength of its Q1 results.

T-Systems, the IT services arm of Deutsche Telekom, has entered a partnership with US-based UiPath, whose AI-powered business automation software platform will be hosted on Deutsche Telekom's Open Telekom Cloud, located exclusively in European data centers. This, says T-Systems, ensures "data sovereignty" and compliance with European standards such as GDPR.

Sky, the UK-based purveyor of pay-TV and more, has secured TV rights to non-Premier League English soccer over a five-year period in a deal worth £935 million ($1.18 billion). In total, 1,059 matches from the English Football League (EFL) are set to be broadcast exclusively across existing Sky Sports channels from the 2024/25 season onwards. The new deal, says Sky, represents a 50% increase on the value of the current rights agreement.

Anonymized data collected by O2 reveals that 114,000 Brits bothered to take the trip into central London to gawp in awe at the historic and not-at-all-anachronistic-in-the-twenty-first-century Coronation procession (although some of them could have been royalty-rejecting protestors who were arrested for being in possession of luggage straps, of course).

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading