Eurobites: BT outsources logistics operations to GXO

Iliad, the fast-growing telco owned by French moneybags Xavier Niel, has confirmed that it has made an offer to buy Vodafone's Italian unit, according to a Financial Times report (paywall applies). No financial details were given. UK-based Vodafone has struggled in Italy of late, clocking up seven consecutive quarters of falling service revenues, with the figure down 1.3%, to about €1.1 billion ($1.3 billion), for its recent third quarter. (See Iliad buying Vodafone Italy would need a few miracles.)

Finnish Internet exchange provider TREX has chosen IP routing platforms from Nokia to help it scale up its regional interconnection and peering infrastructure. TREX will press into service the Nokia 7220 Interconnect Router platform running on the SR Linux network operating system.

EE has once again come up smelling of roses in the latest survey of operators' 5G performance in UK cities by RootMetrics, which covers the second half of 2021. According to the report, EE "delivers the best overall 5G experience in the UK," providing the "highest 5G availability and fastest 5G median download speed in more cities than any other operator." The other three operators covered – Three, Vodafone and O2 – were all commended for improving their 5G performance. RootMetrics used the latest Samsung 5G-enabled smartphones purchased off the shelf from operator stores to test both 4G LTE and 5G performance.

Hackwatch latest: The UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has been the subject of a major cybersecurity incident, according to a BBC report citing details from a tender document published on a government website. Security experts from BAE Systems Applied Intelligence were called upon to help the government department deal with the intrusion, but it is not thought that any highly sensitive material was breached.

The FTTH Conference 2022, which was to have taken place from March 29-31 in Vienna, has been postponed until May 23-25 due to lingering worries about the COVID-19 situation in Austria. The structure of the conference will remain unchanged and all tickets already bought for the original dates will be valid for the new dates, say the organizers.

Israel-based Allot has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a move that will allow service providers to deploy new Allot cloud-native application workloads on the AWS cloud.

Another bit of Amazon, Prime Video, has agreed a "multimillion-pound long-term contract" with the UK's Shepperton Studios for exclusive use of their new facilities to create original, own-brand TV and movie offerings. Once construction is completed in 2023, Shepperton Studios will comprise 31 purpose-built stages, making it the second-biggest studio in the world, says its owner, Pinewood.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading