What’s up with… OneWeb + BT, Andrew Coward, Cohere, Aryaka

• OneWeb and BT in talks over rural broadband coverage
• Andrew Coward lands plum SDN role at IBM
• Cohere Technologies pitches a spectrum multiplier
• Aryaka boasts EMEA success

A potential tie-up between a saved satellite broadband hopeful and a national telco, a new role for a telco cloud sector veteran, and an intriguing pitch for spectral capacity watchers catch the eye in today’s news roundup.

• Satellite firm OneWeb, which emerged from bankruptcy with investments from the UK government and Bharti Airtel late last year and attracted additional funding earlier this year, is in talks with BT about helping the UK national operator provide Internet access to the remotest parts of Britain, according to Bloomberg.   
• Andrew Coward, until recently the CEO at Lumina Networks, has landed a plum role at IBM, where he is now the General Manager of Software Defined Networking. Coward will focus on evolving IBM’s hybrid cloud software offerings with a particular focus on extending the company’s network capabilities.
• Cohere Technologies, a specialist in Delay Doppler-based channel detection, estimation and prediction technology for beamforming, has unveiled its Spectrum Multiplier, a software system that, the company claims, can extend a “mobile network’s spectral efficiency by as much as 2x,” and be deployed either as an element in an integrated radio access network platform or, from the end of this year, as an application for cloud-based RAN deployments (including Open RAN). Check out the details in this press release.
• Aryaka Networks, which runs an international SD-WAN platform serving enterprise users, is boasting “major customer wins” in the EMEA region, including a $10 million deal with a financial services company covering more than 80 sites. Aryaka says it’s beating out telcos as it wins some of these deals (displacing legacy MPLS contracts), but it’s not naming those telcos or any customers. To find out more, see this press release.   
• Meanwhile, another major SD-WAN specialist, Versa Networks, is seeking attention today, talking up the efficiencies and enhanced performance and security that comes with its SASE (secure access service edge) capabilities. See this press release for more. 
• Say what you like about Google but it does seem to follow the ‘fail fast’ mantra... usually. True, it arguably took its time to bring Loon back to earth, but it’s just made up for that by executing a swerve on Stadia, its cloud gaming platform that was launched with great fanfare in late 2019. According to The Independent it’s shut down the internal studio that was creating some of the games for the platform and that has inevitably invited questions about the future of the platform itself. Google says it would rather ‘deepen its partnerships’ with the games industry than (presumably) compete with them with its own titles. As a result Jade Raymond, head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, is leaving the company: The question now is whether this is a sign of further trouble ahead for Stadia. 
• The UK Post Office has sold its fixed line and broadband services business, which has 465,000 customers, to UK ISP and energy provider Shell Energy. The broadband business is currently managed by TalkTalk’s wholesale division. Shell Energy already has around 130,000 broadband customers and claims one of its objectives for bulking up is to explore the potential of converged energy/broadband services that can help customers take advantage of low-carbon, multi-source energy systems.
• The planned merger between Vodafone Spain and MásMóvil is an “open secret,” according to Spanish newspaper El Economista. 
• FPT Telecom has deployed Ciena hardware and software, including Blue Planet applications, to build a more robust and reliable data transport network in Vietnam. See this press release for further details. 

- The staff, TelecomTV