Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Italy's new cloud infrastructure joint venture selects a CEO; KPN extends SD-WAN offer; WightFibre switches off copper network.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

August 30, 2022

2 Min Read
Eurobites: Orange chooses Equinix for telco cloud boost

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Italy's new cloud infrastructure joint venture selects a CEO; KPN extends SD-WAN offer; WightFibre switches off copper network.

  • Orange has turned to Equinix's "bare metal as a service" offering, Equinix Metal, to help fortify its telco cloud model. The new model, says Orange, enables it to provide business and wholesale customers with on-demand telco cloud points of presence (PoPs), delivering services such as SD-WAN, CDN, 5G roaming and voice services, with an expected latency below 10 milliseconds. Orange envisages three such PoPs being deployed by the end of the year, in Amsterdam, Madrid and Seattle. Figure 1: (Source: iStock) (Source: iStock)

    • Former Ericsson man Emanuele Iannetti has been appointed CEO of the newly incorporated company set up by Telecom Italia (TIM), Leonardo, CDP and Sogei to oversee the design, construction and management of Italy's National Strategic Hub infrastructure for the provision of cloud services to the Italian state.

    • Dutch incumbent operator KPN has launched SD-WAN Premium, a service which, says the company, makes it easier for large companies to stay in control of their networks by allowing separate networks to be managed by one overarching service.

    • WightFibre, the company that has been busy digging trenches across the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast, claims to it is the first UK operator to switch off its copper network. WightFibre has been operating a hybrid fiber-coaxial network (HFC) network on the Isle of Wight since 2001 but in 2018 WightFibre began the rollout of a new full-fiber network across the island. The company says that for most islanders the migration away from copper was "seamless," although a few rotary-dial telephones and ageing alarm systems could not handle the brave new world of fiber.

    • Ericsson and Nokia were among a number of Western technology companies announcing plans on Monday for a complete withdrawal from Russia, according to a Reuters report. Last week US laptop giant Dell became the latest big name to announce that it was getting the hell out of Putin's kingdom.

    • BT says its TV customers equipped with a BT TV Box Pro can now go aerial-free, should they so desire. When a customer sets up his or her BT TV Box Pro for the first time, they’ll be given the option in the set-up process to either connect via "Internet mode" or "aerial mode." But is ditching the aerial good for the planet or your electricity bill? A study carried out by the BBC in 2020 found that viewing over streaming, cable and satellite platforms used a mean of 0.15-0.19kWh per device-hour (78-98 gCO2e) while terrestrial broadcast used a mean of 0.06kWh (31 gCO2e). Discuss.

      — 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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