What’s up with… Starlink & T-Mobile US, Zzoomm, Anatel

• T-Mobile’s exclusive deal with Starlink has a one-year expiry date
• Zzoomm hires M&A advisors 
• Brazil’s regulator is caught in the middle of X legal tussle

In today’s industry news roundup: T-Mobile US may have an exclusive satellite-to-smartphone deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink, but that arrangement has a shelf life; UK fibre altnet is looking to grow through M&A deals; Brazil’s telecom watchdog is caught in an unenviable position; and more!

T-Mobile US has been making much of its exclusive deal with SpaceX, and its low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite operator Starlink, to provide comms services direct from Starlink’s ‘birds’ to regular smartphones, a service that is expected to be launched this year and would give T-Mobile a head start over rivals AT&T and Verizon, as previously reported. However, that period of carrier exclusivity will last for only a year before SpaceX founder Elon Musk opens the service to other mobile service providers, Musk noted in this post on X. Might AT&T and Verizon be tempted? They have already signed up for satellite-to-smartphone service delivery with AST SpaceMobile, which is about to put its first commercial satellites into orbit. It is worth remembering that SpaceX and T-Mobile have only demonstrated text-based comms so far, although there is the promise of voice calls “later”. In yet another example of Musk’s innate modesty, he says he wants no more than to partner with every mobile service provider in every country on the planet. However, being a humble chap, he is prepared to start out with a single, limited period exclusivity with just one carrier per market. Indeed, Starlink has already signed to provide “direct-to-cell” service with Rogers of Canada, Optus in Australia, One in New Zealand, Salt in Switzerland and KDDI in Japan. As TelecomTV recently reported, SpaceX says that expansion of the LEO constellation means that, before year-end, T-Mobile US will be able to boast that its coverage across the entire US will be free of dead zones, even in the remotest of areas. 

UK fibre broadband altnet Zzoomm has hired advisors to help it find potential merger partners in a bid to gain scale through M&A deals, according to Sky News. The company, which is backed by US private equity firm investor Oaktree Capital Management, has built out its network in 29 market towns and small urban communities in a number of English counties (Berkshire, Cheshire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire and Yorkshire), has its network ready to connect to 200,000 properties and has more than 30,000 paying customers. Zzoomm CEO Matthew Hare noted in June that the operator is “well positioned to make acquisitions in fragmented and competitive markets as we are growing faster, have a more highly valued brand and network and stronger commercial proposition than many of our peers. An enlarged group, based around our established operational and effectiveness and technical infrastructure, would benefit from the economies of scale.”     

Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel is caught in the middle of the ongoing wrangle between judge Alexandre de Moraes and Elon Musk following the judge’s decision to ban X (fka Twitter) in Brazil. Anatel now has to inform all of the country’s communications service providers (CSPs) that they must block access to the Musk-owned popular social media platform, according to Reuters, which also noted (in another report) that the legal dispute has spread to Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband operations, which have had their bank accounts in Brazil frozen by the judge.   

Everyone and their dog wants to collaborate with AI chip giant Nvidia these days, mostly to develop and deliver AI services of one sort or another to the enterprise sector. The latest examples of such partnerships came just last week, the same week as Nvidia unveiled its latest earnings report, when a roll call of major systems integrator names, including Accenture, Deloitte and World Wide Technology (WWT), lined up to offer Nvidia’s cloud-native AI application developer blueprints to their enterprise customers, while the likes of Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo are offering Nvidia-based IT infrastructure to support the use of the blueprints and the development of new applications. But there are opportunities to be mined in the telecom operations sector as well, reckons giant Indian systems integrator Infosys, which has been collaborating with Nvidia for some time already. Infosys has unveiled a suite of telco-focused generative AI (GenAI) applications, based on its Topaz GenAI platform and developed using a range of Nvidia software tools, including its NIM microservices and Nemo Guardrails toolkit “to customise and deploy generative AI telco domain-specific” large language models (LLMs). The Infosys solutions are focused on network service design processes, a GenAI-enabled network operating centre (NOC) platform and a contact centre system. “Telcos are increasingly adopting generative AI solutions to improve the productivity of their businesses with smarter networks, more efficient operations, and enhanced customer service,” noted Ronnie Vasishta, senior VP of Telecom at Nvidia. “Leveraging Nvidia’s full-stack accelerated computing and AI platform, Infosys Topaz is delivering a suite of domain-specific solutions that will help telcos accelerate and streamline their adoption of generative AI,” he added. Infosys isn’t alone in developing telco-specific GenAI solutions, of course – the likes of Netcracker Technology and Amdocs have been riding this particular rollercoaster for a while already – but hooking up with Nvidia will give any vendor a better fighting chance when it comes to grabbing the attention of customers these days. 

Australia’s Telstra has long been a proving ground for the latest radio access network (RAN) technology developed by Ericsson and so it has proved again, with the close partners announcing that the giant Swedish vendor’s latest mobile network platform chipset, the RAN Processor 6672, has made its commercial debut in the telco’s network. “With live deployment on August 14 2024, this technology marks a new era in mobile data and connectivity, setting a new benchmark for speed, reliability, and efficiency,” stated the vendor. “Telstra deployed Ericsson’s RAN Processor 6672 in a baseband pooling configuration, also called a centralised RAN (C-RAN) configuration, delivering greater than three times capacity compared to the previous generation,” it added. Telstra is the first network operator to “test, validate, and operate commercial traffic on this RAN compute platform within their C-RAN hubs that service multiple radio sites. In a C-RAN configuration, the new RAN processors offer up to 60% lower energy consumption compared to a distributed deployment,” noted Ericsson, which also included (as is seemingly required these days) an AI angle in its announcement. “The new platform supports advanced automation and AI/ML capabilities, enabling a programmable network that offers enhanced flexibility and responsiveness. Compared to previous generations, the new RAN processors can have up to 20 times more pre-loaded AI models with higher inference capacity enabling superior user experience through AI.” Read more.  

Indian telco Bharti Airtel, chip giant MediaTek and Nokia have completed trials that “efficiently combine TDD [time division duplex] and FDD [frequency division duplex] mid-band spectrum on a time basis” to achieve uplink speeds of 300Mbit/s at the operator’s labs, using Nokia 5G Airscale radio access network (RAN) equipment and MediaTek’s Dimensity smartphone chip platform (the model wasn’t specified). For the trial, the partners aggregated uplink capacity in the 3.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz bands, “a groundbreaking innovation that significantly improves the uplink performance for demanding use cases [such as extended reality] by dynamically switching the uplink transmission across two carriers in TDD and FDD spectrum more efficiently,” noted Airtel in this announcement. 

The love-in between Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Vladimir Putin of Russia that started in September 2023 has begun to adversely affect the Hermit Kingdom’s relationship with its neighbour and long-term economic benefactor, China. Cracks have begun to appear on the carefully applied smiley-face makeup that has been welded in place for the 75 years since China and North Korea first became bosom buddies. Last year, Kim Jong Un trundled into Russia, at a stately top speed of 30 miles per hour aboard his 310 metre-long Taeyangho armoured train, to make a state visit. In June this year, Putin reciprocated and travelled to North Korea for a second date with Kim, where the two leaders signed a mutual defence treaty and pledged to deepen cooperation between the two countries. A week after Putin’s visit, North Korea switched its state TV broadcast transmission from a Chinese satellite to a Russian one, an act that miffed the Chinese government. Now the relationship has soured further, with North Korea making an official complaint to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva to the effect that China failed to inform the North Korean authorities that part of a 191-strong deployment of new telecom “facilities and emplacements” (towers) is close to the North Korean border and so could exert “undue influence” on the country and thus constitute an “infringement” of ITU guidelines and regulations. According to Japan’s Kyodo News Service, North Korea’s main gripe is that the new facilities, which can be used for multiple purposes (including FM radio broadcasts), being built in the Chinese city of Dandong could “bombard” North Korea with radio signals that the general population would be able to hear. You can tell that the North Korean regime is angry because, rather than dealing with the matter in secret (as is the norm for everything from the nuclear industry to the price of fish), the authorities chose to directly involve the ITU, which is a United Nations (UN) agency. Living up to its reputation for well-rehearsed bureaucratic obfuscation, the ITU issued a statement that it “cannot confirm whether or not it received such a complaint” because “such objections may contain sensitive or confidential information not intended for the general public and may hamper bilateral consultations.” It added that there is no formal obligation for interested parties to agree with one another before registering FM stations with the ITU or bringing them into service. Thus, “operation of FM stations in these countries without prior coordination does not represent an infringement of ITU’s Radio Regulations.” However, “such coordination is very much desirable and recommended to avoid interference.” Thank you, and goodnight. Last year 98% of North Korea’s foreign trade was with China: It might pay North Korea not to poke the Chinese dragon in the ribs whilst snuggling up to its new paramour, the Russian bear.

– The staff, TelecomTV