Eurobites: UK government puts up £40M to foster 5G innovation

Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has recorded what it says are its highest half-year revenues in its history, notching up sales of 36.5 billion Saudi Arabian riyals ($9.73 billion), an increase of 8.17% on the same period a year ago. Net profit reached SAR6.11 billion ($1.62 billion), a 4.17% increase. The operator made hay during the Hajj pilgrimage season, with its 5G network recording a 211% increase in data usage on the previous year.

Finnish operator Elisa has drawn on Wind River's cloud expertise to deploy what the two companies describe as the first fully automated edge data center commercial service. According to Elisa, process automation meant that overall deployment time was reduced by around 50% in terms of staff hours. The project combined Wind River's Studio Cloud Platform as the production-grade distributed Kubernetes offering for managing cloud infrastructure, user plane function (UPF) application from Elisa's current 5G core vendor, and the capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, a platform that provides a "single pane of glass" to manage and automate applications deployment in large-scale distributed environments.

Gutermann, a Swiss company specializing in leak detection, is using Deutsche Telekom's narrowband IoT connectivity to carry out cloud-based analysis of acoustic data from water pipes to reduce the cost of spotting and fixing the sort of leaks which account for up to 10% of the German drinking water supply, according to government data published in 2020. During the analysis of acoustic data, software automatically filters out background noises, then the noise profiles of the sensors are compared with each other. If there is a leak, the noise profiles of neighboring sensors are identical.

UK fixed-line provider TalkTalk has extended its 25-year relationship with unified communications company Gamma by striking another three-year deal. Gamma operates in the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading