• France’s 5G spectrum auction ends
• Nokia’s 5G milestone 
• BT offloads LatAm assets

A swift end to the French 5G spectrum auction and 5G contract, plus network slicing, news from Nokia lead us into the week’s final selection of news snippets.

After only 17 rounds of bidding, the French auction of 5G spectrum in the 3.4–3.8 GHz band is over. The operators coughed up €2.786 billion between them for their licenses, which is far from the excessive payments that faced Italy’s operators after its primary auction in 2018 (€6.5 billion between them) but which still represents a sizeable layout in challenging times. Orange walked away with 90 MHz of spectrum, SFR with 80 MHz, and both Bouygues Telecom and Free Mobile (Iliad) snagged 70 MHz, so no real surprises with the outcome. But the process is not over: Now the winning bidders get to participate in a “positioning” auction to determine which blocks they get in the 3.4 – 3.8 GHz band. For more details, including how much each operator paid, see this announcement from Arcep, the French regulator.

Nokia says it signed 17 new 5G deals during the third quarter, taking its total to 100. It’s been a good week for Nokia in 5G thanks mainly to the reputation-boosting contract signed with BT. It’s worth noting that 12% of Nokia’s 5G deals are with enterprise customers.

The Finnish vendor has also announced an enhancement to its network slicing capabilities, saying it can offer 4G/5G multi-domain automated slicing “in minutes instead of hours or days.” It claims: “Nokia’s new slicing management solution consists of radio, transport and core domain controllers and assurance tools. Controllers support real-time slice operations and automation for the creation, modification and deletion of a large number of slices in their respective, multivendor domain.” The multivendor aspect is very important there, of course, but would take some proving. And we’re still scratching our heads here at TelecomTV wondering what constitutes “extreme automation.” For more details, see this press release.

BT has completed the sale of its network assets and operations in Latin America to CIH Telecommunications Americas in a deal that was first announced in March. The business being sold generated revenues of £110 million in the fiscal year that ended in March 2019. The divestment is part of the transformation of BT’s troubled international operations. For more tails, see this press release.  

OSS specialist TEOCO says its Mentor geolocation solution for network and subscriber analytics now supports 5G deployments. See this announcement for further details. 

GTT has hired Tom Homer, well known for his time at Telstra’s European operations, to lead its EMEA sales operation.

Talking of Telstra... has launched a suite of enterprise services called Adaptive Networks as part of its T22 strategy to simplify its service offerings. The suite includes SD-WAN and software-defined networking (SDN) management capabilities. 

Telenor Connexion, the Nordic operator’s IoT operation, is to provide international connectivity to Wayout, which has developed “plug-and-play micro-factories for local production of clean, filtered water, with a minimal eco footprint.” The operator is delivering the service to Wayout using Ericsson IoT Accelerator, the Swedish vendor’s global IoT platform. For more details, see this announcement.

- The staff, TelecomTV