• The EC is stumping up €142m in backbone network grants
• HPE had a great fiscal fourth quarter
• Nokia lands RAN deals with IoH and du

In today’s industry news roundup: The European Commission is providing grants to multiple subsea and terrestrial backbone cable network builds; HPE’s Q4 revenues were up by 15%; Nokia has secured RAN deals in Indonesia and the UAE; and much more!

The European Commission has signed grant agreements worth €142m with 21 projects that are upgrading or deploying new backbone cables, including submarine cables, that enhance Europe’s connectivity. “Submarine cables transport more than 98% of the global telecom traffic and play an essential role for the resilience and security of digital connectivity,” noted the EC, which is funding the grants from its Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital pot. “CEF Digital puts the security of this critical infrastructure at its core, by ensuring all beneficiaries of CEF grants are EU-controlled entities and the cables that will be deployed are built with secure technology. Almost all the funded cables are equipped with large geographical sensors to monitor nearby activities and with early warning systems to protect the infrastructure itself,” added the EC, without referencing the recent subsea cable cuts in the Baltic Sea. More information about the funded projects can be found here.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) reported strong results for its fiscal fourth quarter that ended 31 October. Revenues increased by 15% year on year to $8.5bn while operating profit grew almost 27% to $693m. “Our differentiated portfolio across hybrid cloud, AI, and networking, which will be further enhanced with the pending Juniper Networks acquisition, positions us well to capitalise on the market opportunity, accelerating value for our shareholders,” stated HPE’s president and CEO, Antonio Neri. The sales growth was driven by a 32% increase in server revenues to $4.7bn and an 18% increase in hybrid cloud to $1.6bn, though sales of intelligent edge products (including edge gateways and Aruba edge services platforms) were down 20% to $1.1bn. HPE is in the process of trying to complete its planned $14bn acquisition of Juniper Networks: It noted that the deal has “received approval from key jurisdictions, including the European Union, United Kingdom, India, South Korea, and Australia, among others,” and that HPE and Juniper are “cooperatively engaged with the US Department of Justice as the agency continues to review the transaction into the new calendar year. HPE and Juniper expect that the transaction will close in the early part of 2025 – within the previously stated timeframe,” HPE added. Industry observers don’t expect anything to happen soon, as the DoJ is currently in limbo ahead of Donald Trump’s new term as US president, which is due to commence on 20 January. 

Nokia has announced two notable mobile infrastructure deals in recent days. The vendor has secured a two-year extension to its deal to provide Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) with radio access network equipment for the Indonesian operator’s 4G and 5G network. And it is supplying United Arab Emirates (UAE) operator du with the technology for a commercial 5G cloud RAN deployment in the form of virtualised distributed unit (vDU) and centralised unit (vCU) stacks running on Dell PowerEdge XR8620 servers and Red Hat’s OpenShift cloud platform.  

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has completed the first constellation of Starlink low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites that will provide direct-to-cell/smartphone services, reports Space.com. T-Mobile US is set to use the network to offer services in areas that can’t be reached by its terrestrial mobile network, a move the companies first unveiled in August 2022. US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently gave T-Mobile US the green light to offer such services from space using its licensed spectrum, provided it doesn’t interfere with other networks, reported Reuters. Commenting on the launch of the satellites, Musk posted on X that the constellation will “enable unmodified cellphones to have internet connectivity in remote areas. Bandwidth per beam is only [about] 10Mbit/s, but future constellations will be much more capable.” 

Spanish satellite company Sateliot, which is building a constellation of 100 LEO satellites to provide global IoT connectivity, has secured a €30m loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to help finance the rollout of its constellation. The company noted it is “rolling out a network of satellites that act like mobile telecom towers in low-earth orbit, providing 5G narrowband internet of things (5G-NB-IoT) connectivity to over 8 million devices in rural, oceanic, and other remote areas.” Read more. 

AI chip and software giant Nvidia is collaborating with the Vietnamese government to establish its Vietnam Research and Development Center focused on AI. The company will use the centre to focus on software development. “We are delighted to open Nvidia’s R&D centre to accelerate Vietnam’s AI journey,” said Jensen Huang, the company’s founder and CEO. “With our expertise in AI development, we will partner with a vibrant ecosystem of researchers, startups and enterprise organisations to build incredible AI right here in Vietnam,” he added. Huang previously pledged to invest $250m in Vietnam, which is now a hotbed of datacentre development activity.  

The O-RAN Alliance has completed its ninth plugfest, which took place at 11 venues, was co-hosted by 29 operators, OTICs (open testing and integration centres) and academic and research institutions and boasted 115 participating companies and institutions, some of which participated at more than one venue. During the course of the plugfest, which ran from August to November, the participants conducted tests and trials that involved product interoperability, multi-vendor service management and orchestration (SMO) configurations, RAN intelligent controller (RIC) platforms and associated applications, open-source RAN functions and more. Participants included AT&T, Boost Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Docomo, Orange, Rakuten Mobile, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Telus, Telecom Italia (TIM), Verizon, Vodafone and dozens of vendors, such as Ericsson, Fujitsu, Mavenir, Nokia and Nvidia. Read more.

– The staff, TelecomTV