In separate news, BT has also been announced as the flagship customer for a new CDN-as-a-service offering from Cisco, Qwilt and Digital Alpha. The service is based on open caching, an architecture developed by the Streaming Video Alliance. (See Cisco, Qwilt, Digital Alpha take on CDNs with open caching.)

Swisscom reckons it has achieved a world first by achieving a transmission speed of 50 Gbit/s in a "real network environment" by upgrading existing OLT (optical line termination) hardware with a 50Gbit/s PON (passive optical network) line card prototype. The company believes that the technology will be ready for commercial launch in around two years.

South Africa-based Vodacom has lodged an urgent appeal against the revocation of its operating license in Lesotho following its alleged failure to pay a M134 million (US$8 million) fine. The fine, issued by the Lesotho Communications Authority (LCA), is for what the LCA views as contraventions of section 97 of the country's Companies Act and certain conditions of its unified license. Commenting on the LCA's decision, Vodacom Lesotho's MD, Philip Amoateng, said: "We had no option but to seek relief in the courts because the LCA's decisions imposing an excessive fine as well as the revocation of Vodacom's operating license are both erroneous as a matter of law and public policy." (See Vodacom Lesotho's license revoked.)

Telefónica UK (O2) has chosen Nokia's subscriber data management (SDM) software to improve the security and reliability of its networks and drive 5G services innovation. According to the Finnish vendor, SDM increases efficiency by controlling network data in a centralized hub and using only the containerized microservices that are required by a particular application.

South Africa's MTN has joined forces with the Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to support the evolution of its transport infrastructure over the next three years. TIP is a community of companies and organizations that are seeking to advance global connectivity through the use of open, disaggregated and standards-based technologies. (See Facebook's TIP Is Desperate to Add Friends.)

Shareholders in KPN have approved the appointment of Alejandro Plater – whose day job is chief operating officer of A1 Telekom Austria Group – to the Dutch incumbent's supervisory board. Plater was designated for this position by América Móvil, and he succeeds Carlos Garcia Moreno Elizondo, who resigned for personal reasons.

Sparkle, Telecom Italia's international arm, has signed an agreement with TOP-IX (Torino Piemonte Internet Exchange), a carrier-neutral and non-profit interconnection point for the exchange of Internet traffic in north-west Italy. Through the agreement, the 120 networks already connected at the Turin exchange point will benefit from Sparkle's global Tier 1 IP Transit service, Seabone, and city-to-city transport offerings available at the TOP-IX marketplace.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading