A week in telecoms: Vodafone ties with Microsoft on AI, Orange goes Bleu and the EU gets serious about QKD

Vodafone and Microsoft tie on AI, IoT and fintech

Vodafone announced a bold and wide-ranging agreement with Microsoft that aims to create new services for enterprise and consumer customers in the fields of artificial intelligence, IoT, mobile money services and more.

The ten-year deal will see Vodafone invest $1.5 billion in cloud and customer-focused AI services developed in conjunction with Microsoft. Notably, Vodafone aims to replace its physical data centers with virtual ones operated by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Vodafone also plans to scale its African fintech platform, M-Pesa, which is operated by Vodacom and Safaricom.

Microsoft will use Vodafone’s fixed and mobile connectivity services and also intends to invest in Vodafone’s managed IoT connectivity platform, which the operator said will become a separate, standalone business by April 2024.

Vodafone said it is aiming to support 300 million businesses and consumers across its European and African markets through the collaboration.

Overall, the two partners aim to collaborate in five key areas: GenAI, involving the use of services such as Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI; IoT; M-Pesa; the sale of Microsoft services to enterprises; and the replacement of physical data centers. 

The move comes as Vodafone attempts to turn around its businesses in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

BT in talks with Starlink over rural connectivity

BT confirmed it is in talks with Space-X-owned Starlink over the possibility of using the latter’s low-earth orbit (LEO) constellation to improve broadband and mobile connectivity, although no deal has been agreed.

The operator is currently testing Starlink equipment at its research center in Adastral Park. Using LEO satellites to help plug coverage gaps is a definite area of interest, and BT is already in trials with LEO operator OneWeb, with which it signed a global partnership in November 2021.

As things stand, reports say BT is initially interested in improving connectivity for enterprise customers. It’s not clear whether or not the operator is also exploring Starlink’s direct-to-cell service.

SpaceX recently launched the first six Starlink satellites to support direct-to-cell and is working closely with T-Mobile US in this area. 

Last year, T-Mobile and SpaceX issued an open invitation to wireless providers around the world to expand globally with reciprocal roaming. So far, six operators have come on board, including Japan’s KDDI, Australia’s Optus, One NZ in New Zealand, Entel in Chile and Peru, Rogers in Canada and Salt of Switzerland.

Starlink recently completed successful tests for sending and receiving text messages using standard LTE smartphones and T-Mobile spectrum. 

Telecom Egypt and ZOI plot Eurasian digital corridor

Telecom Egypt and Zain Omantel International (ZOI) announced plans to create what they described as a digital corridor connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, noting this will provide a new route for data transfers between Asia and Europe.

It will be made up of a combination of terrestrial and marine routes, with a large number of optical fibers. Mohamed Nasr, managing director and CEO at Telecom Egypt, hailed the project as a “game-changer in the Eurasia route connectivity landscape.”

The terrestrial segments will cross Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while the subsea section will directly link Saudi Arabia and Egypt through the Red Sea, via a high capacity, repeaterless cable system.

In addition, the infrastructure will be extended to Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan using ZOI’s network and in collaboration with the licensed cable landing parties in each country.

Sohail Qadir, CEO at ZOI, said the “one-of-a-kind infrastructure will be expanded to most of ZOI’s network footprint to maximize the benefit to our group operations across the region. The value that this digital corridor will create is enormous and it will be widely realized in the region and beyond not only from a connectivity point of view, but also on technological, commercial and social levels.” 

The news of the new collaboration has nevertheless come amid growing tensions in the Middle East and the Red Sea. 

Orange goes live with Bleu cloud platform

Orange and Capgemini launched commercial activities for a new independent cloud platform called Bleu that is based on Microsoft Azure.

The partners first announced the plan to establish Bleu in 2021, but it has taken some time to get all the pieces into place. Bleu’s first services, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, will not go live on the platform before the end of 2024, but the new venture is now engaging with select “French public and private organizations to ensure that they are ready for the migration.”

All Bleu services will also have to meet the requirements necessary to receive the SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification from France’s National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), as well as legal requirements needed to confirm its status as a “cloud de confiance” operator. Orange said Bleu aims to obtain the qualification in 2025.

The key focus is to create a French cloud service provider that satisfies “the unique needs of a specific set of organizations,” including the French state, public administrations, hospitals and critical infrastructure companies.

All data centers will be located in France and separated from Microsoft’s global data center infrastructure. In addition, Bleu will be entirely operated by its own staff in France.

NTT DoCoMo announces GenAI advances

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo unveiled new developments using generative artificial intelligence (AI), as it seeks to exploit the capabilities of the technology.

For example, it has developed GenAI that automatically generates non-player characters (NPCs), characters not controlled by the player, in the metaverse based solely on text input. 

The operator said the technology generates NPCs that embody distinct appearances, behaviors and roles in 20 minutes, “eliminating the need for specialized programming or algorithmic expertise.” It noted that the development forms part of its Lifestyle Co-Creation Lab, where it works with partners to evaluate life-enhancing technologies. 

DoCoMo plans to further enhance this technology and implement it in the DOOR metaverse operated by NTT QONOQ within the fiscal year ending in March 2025.

Meanwhile, DoCoMo also announced it has developed an AI technology that predicts how the brains of adult people will physically change over time and, using a dataset of around 150,000 MRI brain scans, automatically generates images of how people’s brains are expected to look in the future. 

The technology uses a machine-learning framework known as a generative adversarial network (GAN) to make predictions based on various factors.

Europe kicks off quantum key distribution consortium called Nostradamus

The European Commission has commissioned a consortium dubbed Nostradamus to build the testing infrastructure for quantum key distribution (QKD) and thereby enable the evaluation of European manufacturers’ QKD devices. 

Deutsche Telekom is leading the consortium, and other partners include Thales, the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, and experts from across industry and academia. 

According to DT, the move paves the way for the implementation of European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI) – a highly secure pan-European communication network based on quantum technology.

The aim of EuroQCI is to provide more security for data centers, communications networks and critical infrastructure such as hospitals and power plants via fiber optics and satellite. The use of quantum technology is a key pillar of the EU’s strategy for cyber security in the coming decades.

The future encrypted EU satellite network IRIS2 (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) also relies on EuroQCI and is intended to provide governments with communication services and network critical infrastructure. 

After Galileo for navigation and Copernicus for earth observation, IRIS2 is the third pillar of the EU’s space infrastructure. The first services are due to be launched this year and full operation is planned for 2027.

Also noted…

The Italian government cleared the planned sale of Telecom Italia’s landline grid (NetCo) to investor KKR, paving the way to the completion of the deal. 

Reuters reported that European Union approval of the proposed merger of Orange Spain and Masmovil is imminent.

Swisscom announced a collaboration with Nvidia to build GenAI full-stack supercomputers in Switzerland

Telecom Egypt was granted the country’s first license to install and operate a 5G network.