Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Ericsson swallows Vonage; Deutsche Telekom and Commerzbank combine for supply-chain slickness; the Internet of Sheds.
Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Ericsson swallows Vonage; Deutsche Telekom and Commerzbank combine for supply-chain slickness; the Internet of Sheds.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has given the green light to the proposal by BT and Warner Bros. Discovery to set up a 50:50 joint venture for live TV sport, effectively combining the BT Sport and Eurosport channels in the UK and Ireland. According to a statement, both BT Sport and Eurosport UK will initially retain their separate brands and product offerings before being brought together under a single brand in the future. Marc Allera, CEO BT’s Consumer division, has been named chairman of the joint venture's board, while the "management and delivery" of the new company will be led by Andrew Georgiou, president and MD of Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe. (See BT limps off pitch with Warner sports deal as business withers and BT outlook good on Discovery deal, not so good on revenue.) Figure 1: 
(Source: BT)
In other deal news, Ericsson has completed its $6.2 billion acquisition of Vonage, a cloud communications platform that will sit within Ericsson's Enterprise division alongside Cradlepoint, another fairly recent Ericsson acquisition. The point of the deal, according to Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm, is to create an "open global innovation platform," with Vonage's million or so registered developers being able to access various 5G network (acronyms incoming!!!) QoS APIs (quality of service application programming interfaces). (See Ericsson gets US clearance for Vonage take-off.)
Deutsche Telekom and Commerzbank have decided to pool their respective expertise for the benefit of Germany's industrial sector, developing what they describe as "fully automated supply chains with integrated financial services." All the usual suspects – 5G, AI, IoT, blockchain and cloud technology – are in the mix. Specifically, the hope is that, through all this whizzy new communications tech supplied through Deutsche Telekom, producers and suppliers will be able to communicate with Commerzbank digitally, with orders, payments and other processes automatically triggered as and when required.
Swiss mobile operator Salt is once again savouring success, being declared the top dog in a test of 82 operators carried out by 5GMark, a mobile performance test platform. The average download speed measured was 258.9 Mbit/s, the average upload 39.5 Mbit/s.
The future's bright. The future's connected sheds. UK provider TalkTalk is hoping to sell more broadband packages by playing on the importance of having decent Wi-Fi in the garden, for those lucky enough to have a garden. It's commissioned a survey that found, among other stats, that 72% of parents believe that having a decent Wi-Fi signal al fresco would encourage their kids to play outdoors during the summer vacation. Yeah, right. TalkTalk even enlists the gravitas of Dr. James Bellini, a "technology futurologist and historian of the future" (you can't have it both ways, doc), who is not ashamed to say in the here and now that "TalkTalk's Total Home Wi-Fi add-on leverages eero devices to extend your home Wi-Fi into outdoor spaces."
National Express, the UK bus company that has achieved cult status through its gruelling yet keenly priced long-distance-travel business model, has turned to 8x8's cloud-based contact center offering, XCaaS, to help its employees be more productive and improve the customer experience. A bit more legroom wouldn't go amiss either, guys…
— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading
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