Today’s industry news round-up: Three UK’s CEO has asked regulators to approve its planned merger with Vodafone UK, which reported an operating loss in 2023. US regulator FCC plans to restart his $9 billion 5G Fund for Rural America. The fund also includes incentives related to the deployment of open RAN technology. US lawmakers are considering new ways to block Huawei’s access to cutting-edge technology. etc!
three englandWe hope to merge with. vodafone ukhave report Sales increased by 3% year-on-year to approximately £2.6bn, EBITDA decreased by 34% to £402m, and operating loss was 117m due to “increased operating expenses and increased depreciation due to recent impacts” This resulted in a loss of pounds. Increased network investment. ”The carrier had 10.6 million customers at the end of 2023, an increase of 3%. Three British CEOs, Robert Finnegan, used the results to pressure British regulators to approve the plans. £16.5bn merger The partnership with Vodafone UK is currently being assessed by the country’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and considered under UK national security and investment law. “The costs of deploying and maintaining our 5G network, and our efforts to improve connectivity across the UK, have impacted our profitability for the first time since 2010,” the CEO said. “Despite scaling back 5G investment, this financial performance is clearly unsustainable.The current market structure is four MNOs with investment capacity but not large enough to face sufficient competitive pressures. There are two large players, and two others that lack the scale to be credible challengers (Three UK and Vodafone). The UK will continue to lag behind in 5G. We have the lowest data download speeds, ranking 22nd out of 25 European countries in terms of 5G availability and download speeds. We will improve our services for our customers and our country, and create additional jobs. We are committed to supporting the digital transformation taking place across the UK. The merger with Vodafone will enable us to invest £11 billion over 10 years in the UK, fully supporting Government objectives. “This will enable us to build one of the most advanced standalone 5G networks in Europe.”
Jessica Rosenworcel, Chair of the U.S. Regulatory Authority Federal Communications Commission (FCC)is relaunching its 5G Fund for Rural America now that watchdog agencies have access to available data from the FCC’s improved broadband coverage map. This means that more than 14 million homes and businesses in the United States currently do not have mobile 5G coverage. “For the first time in our history of supporting wireless networks through the Universal Service System, this agency has comprehensive data on where service is and is not across the country,” Rosenworcel said. he said. “This is the foundation of our plan to expand 5G service in rural America to where it is needed most – where people live, work and travel.” If support for the increase is obtained, the FCC will begin a multi-round reverse auction for Phase I of the 5G Fund. The auction will “divide up to $9 billion in costs for deploying 5G communications services to rural areas of the country.” Otherwise, he will deploy 5G-enabled networks without subsidy,” the regulator said. Additionally, to accelerate the deployment of Open RAN and its benefits for competition, national security, and supply chain reliability, the 5G Fund includes up to $900 million to incorporate Open RAN into networks supported by the 5G Fund. will include incentives,” the FCC said. Added. read more.
The US is considering imposing sanctions on a number of related Chinese chip vendors. huawei This comes after the Chinese telecoms technology giant successfully developed and distributed cutting-edge 5G smartphones last year despite suffering from years of trade restrictions. According to Bloomberg.lots of To the chagrin of many American politicians, in late August last year, Huawei announced the Huawei Mate 60 Pro device equipped with a locally produced 5G-enabled “Kirin 9000” 7 nanometer (nm) chip. While Huawei is prohibited from accessing or using U.S. technology, other companies in China’s chip ecosystem are circumventing U.S. sanctions and allowing Huawei to manufacture the components it needs for its 5G smartphones. It is thought that it may have happened. As a result, the U.S. administration is now considering extending sanctions to a number of Chinese semiconductor companies, including Changxin Memory Technologies, Qingdao Si’en, Shenzhen Pensan Technology, and Swaysure.
Eutelsat Group has signed a $500 million agreement with Intelsat to strengthen both companies’ efforts to provide multi-orbit solutions.This agreement allows us to: intelsat Combine geostationary orbit (GEO) and terrestrial networks with OneWeb’s low earth orbit (LEO) network (Recently merged with Eutelsat to form Eutelsat Group).This move is based on an agreement between both parties. in March 2023, with an initial commitment of $250 million from mid-2024, with an option for a further $250 million over the next seven years. Eutelsat said the move will help it deliver “comprehensive customer solutions supporting the network, government and mobility sectors.” Intelsat CEO Dave Wajsgras explained that the partnership will help the company deliver “new, true multi-orbit services and solutions.” Eutelsat Group CEO Eva Berneke called the expanded partnership with Intelsat a “strong statement of confidence in the capabilities of her OneWeb satellite constellation now and in the future.” read more.
rakuten group has released a high-performance open large language model (LLM) optimized for Japanese. One of the models is his 7 billion parameter foundational model developed based on open LLM training by AI startup Mistral AI. The company is also launching an instruction model, which it describes as a version of the underlying model that has been fine-tuned based on instruction-style data, resulting in the model responding to prompted instructions. Models can be used for a variety of tasks, including summarizing content, answering questions, understanding text in general, and building dialogue systems. With this move, the Japanese company has reached a “significant milestone in its performance” and plans to share its learnings with the open source community to “accelerate the development of Japanese LLM,” Rakuten’s chief data officer said. Mr. Ting Cai, an expert in the field, explained: group. read more.
IBM have obtained Network and IT Infrastructure Automation Specialist supple The amount is not disclosed. According to IBM, “Pliant adds significant capabilities for automating network and IT infrastructure tasks and abstracting these functions to the application layer, allowing applications (and developers) to These optimizations include infrastructure resource provisioning and management, traffic management for both traditional networks and IT infrastructure and public clouds. and configuration management.
China’s cloud and digital services giant tencent reported a 10% year-on-year increase in sales to RMB 609 billion ($86 billion) and a 34% increase in operating profit to RMB 191.9 billion ($27.1 billion). Last year, the company launched We leveraged Tencent Hunyuan, a proprietary large-scale language AI foundation model, and scaled it up to 1 trillion parameters. “Tencent Hunyuan has evolved into a top-level foundation model with excellent performance in numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, and multi-turn conversations,” said Ma Huateng, the company’s chairman and CEO. Masu. Announcement of financial results.
Following last week’s news about the continued success and growth of privacy-conscious messaging platforms. telegramFounder and CEO Pavel Durov of the company, which has more than 900 million users (up from 500 million in 2021) and is aiming for an IPO, said the sale will bring the company up to 330 million users. He announced on his Telegram channel that he had raised $10,000. of new bonds, According to Reuters. The funds raised will “further strengthen our position as an independent platform that can challenge the ‘Goliaths’ of our industry,” Durov said, referring to Meta’s WhatsApp and others.
– Telecom TV staff
