A week in telecoms: e&, BT, Open RAN, and 5G in space
Welcome to the Inform weekly news round-up, where we take a look at a selection of recent CSP news and how it impacts the wider industry.
e& expands into central and eastern Europe
e& has agreed to buy a controlling stake in most of the telecoms assets of PPF Group in Bulgaria (Yettel Bulgaria), Hungary (Yettel Hungary), Serbia (Yettel Serbia) and Slovakia (O2 Slovakia) - the exception is PPF’s telco assets in the Czech Republic which are not included in the deal.
The transaction, which is expected to close by the first quarter of 2024, subject to regulatory clearance, would extend e&’s portfolio to 20 countries.
Hatem Dowidar, group CEO of e&, stated in an announcement: “By combining PPF Telecom’s expertise with our own innovative capabilities, we are poised to establish a major telecommunications presence in central and eastern Europe. We aim to realize synergies, optimize procurement efficiencies, and enhance customer offerings, establishing our position as a leading global tech group.”
BT appoints a new CEO
BT Group named Allison Kirkby as the successor to current CEO Philip Jansen, who will remain in post until the end of January 2024 at the latest. Kirkby has been a Non-Executive Director at BT Group since 2019 and said she is “fully supportive” of the operator’s existing turnaround plans.
Kirkby has made a name for herself in Scandinavia, where she currently holds the position of President and CEO at Telia Company in Sweden. She moved into the TMT sector in 2010, initially joining Virgin Media. She served as President and CEO of TDC in Denmark from 2018 to 2020; and as President and CEO of market challenger Tele2 AB from 2015 to 2018.
As for Telia, Chairman Lars-Johan Jarnheimer expressed “regret” that Kirkby has “chosen to leave the company” and said the board is starting the recruitment process to find a new CEO.
Open RAN switching opportunity looms
Rethink Technology Research noted that Europe’s big five telcos — Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone, BT and Telefónica — all have radio access network (RAN) contracts that are set to expire in around 2025 or 2026, and said this will “provide an opportunity for a significant switch towards open RAN.”
According to its latest research, the company said open RAN deployments in public 5G networks will accelerate after 2025, with 1.3 million open RAN cells worth $19.2 billion deployed by 2030.
At the same time, it pointed out that “even Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone, the two most evangelistic about open RAN of those five, only plan for a minority of their cells, around 30% at most, to be open RAN by 2030. However, as our forecast suggests, the majority of new cell deployment worldwide will be open RAN from 2029 onwards.”
Dell’Oro also recently noted that European operators are ahead when it comes to announcing open RAN targets, but have been more cautious with deploying the technology, focusing on building out 5G using traditional RAN. The research form expects the European open RAN market to surpass $1 billion by 2027.
Rethink Technology Research observed that early adopters of open RAN have been mostly greenfield sites, irrespective of geography. “It is true that Japan has led the field, but that is because one of its major operators, Rakuten Mobile, has been building its 5G network from scratch. This in turn galvanized the country’s number one MNO, DoCoMo, but at least partly because this happened by happy coincidence to fit into its business cycle,” the company said.
“Elsewhere, Dish Network in the USA is also a strong early open RAN adopter largely because it is also building a new 5G network. In such cases risks associated with early open RAN adoption are less, with no legacy to accommodate,” it added.
Open RAN is certainly far from an easy task for incumbent mobile network operators, with much work left to be done to enable widescale deployment, at least according to Deutsche Telekom. According to Heavy Reading’s 2023 Open RAN Operator Survey, MNOs also see potential for the open wireless technology in private networks, but not quite ready to whole-heartedly back it in enterprise settings.
Rakuten ties with VEON in Ukraine; OpenAI in Japan
Rakuten Group has already made an impact on the telecoms world thanks to its involvement in building the virtualized, cloud-native mobile network of Rakuten Mobile in Japan and its decision to take its model global through Rakuten Symphony.
The group now plans to put its experiences to good use in Ukraine. Amsterdam-based VEON and Rakuten Symphony have agreed to explore how they could work together to accelerate the reconstruction of net infrastructure in Ukraine through the deployment of open radio access networks (open RAN) and digital services.
VEON, which operates in six markets, is the parent company of Ukraine-based operator Kyivstar and has recently committed to investing $600 million to rebuild Ukraine’s infrastructure. The group was clearly attracted by Rakuten Symphony’s experience with open RAN, describing the technology as “a compelling choice.”
The two companies said they are supporting the ‘We Build Ukraine’ initiative of the Ukrainian State Agency for Reconstruction and Development of Infrastructure. They also plan to explore partnerships in other VEON markets.
Rakuten Group, which offers telecoms, e-commerce, fintech and digital content services in Japan, is also teaming up with OpenAI, made famous (or infamous) by ChatGPT, to collaborate on the development of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) experiences to consumers and businesses in Japan and elsewhere.
Rakuten plans to integrate AI services into its products and service, while OpenAI will provide Rakuten with priority access to its APIs. Furthermore, Rakuten Group will use OpenAI plugin architecture to bring Rakuten AI experiences into ChatGPT products.
Telefónica and Sateliot trumpet 5G in space success
Telefónica and Spanish satellite company Sateliot claimed an industry first by extending 5G connectivity to space, in a test overseen by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The Spanish telco announced last year that its units Telefónica Tech and Telefónica Global Solutions (TGS) divisions were testing Sateliot’s solution to develop a dual 5G NB-IoT connectivity service that integrates the satellite network with existing terrestrial networks to provide IoT connectivity wherever the customer needs it.
According to an update from Sateliot, the two partners have now succeeded in providing a satellite extension to Telefónica’s mobile network through standard GSMA roaming. They used a regular SIM card, run on Telefónica’s Kite platform, on an IoT cellular device, which was able to “seamlessly” switch to Sateliot’s low-earth orbit (LEO) 5G IoT satellite constellation.
Telefónica now anticipates that in 2024 it will be the first MNO to provide its customers with NB-IoT “everywhere-in-the-planet connectivity” through a combination of cellular and satellite standard NB-IoT network, as well as “inexpensive commercial standard NB-IoT devices.”
Telefónica’s collaboration with Sateliot certainly reflects the growing desire of CSPs to reach customers in far-flung areas of their territories, where fiber and even mobile technologies cannot reach. Other recent announcements have come from Australian CSP Telstra, which is partnering with LEO satellite company, Starlink, operated by the SpaceX group owned by Elon Musk.
Telstra is also not the first CSP to join forces with SpaceX, which this year plans to start testing a new service with T-Mobile USA to bring satellite connectivity to mobile phones
Indeed, a recent report from MTN Consulting highlighted that satellite operators provide enormous opportunities and benefits for CSPs.
Arun Menon, Principal Analyst at MTN Consulting, noted that the potential offerings of satellite operators, particularly direct-to-device and IoT, “allow telcos to optimize their infrastructure investments (capex and opex) for deployments in areas with limited coverage or cellular dead zones. Another plus for telcos is the enhanced customer experience supplemented by a network providing ubiquitous coverage.”
Also noted…