What’s up with… VMO2, Corning & AT&T, Telstra

• Virgin Media O2 sells another slice of its towers joint venture
• Corning lands $1bn fibre deal with AT&T
• Telstra deploys Ericsson’s 5G Advanced Automated Energy Saver

In today’s industry news roundup: UK operator VMO2 further reduces its holding in towers joint venture Cornerstone, raising £186m; Corning lands monster deal with AT&T; Telstra goes green with Ericsson; and much more!

UK operator Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) is banking £186m from the sale of an 8.33% stake in UK mobile towers business Cornerstone to infrastructure investor Equitix. VMO2 will still hold a 25.01% stake in Cornerstone, which owns and manages a nationwide network of around 20,000 sites used by VMO2 and Vodafone UK, once the deal is completed. VMO2 previously offloaded a 16.67% stake in Cornerstone for £360m in November 2023.  VMO2’s CEO Lutz Schüler noted: “This additional minority stake sale follows the same logic and strategic rationale as our previous deal, allowing us to successfully monetise our infrastructure while retaining a controlling share in an important asset. Equitix is another strong partner to have onboard that clearly sees the long-term value in Cornerstone at a time when we are investing billions of pounds to enhance 4G coverage and bring 5G to new areas of the country.” The news came as VMO2 announced a 2.4% year-on-year decrease in third-quarter revenues to £2.7bn and a 4.1% decrease in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to just over £1bn. 

Fibre maker Corning has struck a $1bn, multi-year deal to provide AT&T with fibre, cable and connectivity products as the US telco expands its high-speed access network. “As Corning’s largest customer with preferential volume status for Corning’s connectivity solutions, AT&T can accelerate its network expansion and enhance network performance while minimising deployment costs,” noted the vendor. “The agreement, valued at more than $1bn, builds on the decades-long collaboration between AT&T and Corning,” it added. “We’ve built the nation’s fastest broadband network,” noted AT&T CEO John Stankey. “This new multi-year agreement with Corning helps us to connect more households, communities, and businesses with the high-speed, reliable internet they need to thrive in a digital world.” AT&T currently passes 28.3 million premises with its fibre broadband network and is on target to pass more than 30 million by the end of 2025. It’s worth noting also that Corning is one of the companies working with Ericsson on the rollout of Open RAN-enabled radio access network (RAN) sites at AT&T as part of a $14bn, five-year deal struck in December 2023. News of the new deal came as Corning announced an 8% increase in third-quarter revenues to $3.73bn. 

AT&T is to offer its integrated fibre broadband/5G gateway to business customers that order broadband services in excess of 1Gbit/s, starting in early 2025, the US operator has announced. “This innovative gateway is AT&T’s first converged device for business customers. It is designed to deliver lightning-fast fibre internet and helps maintain seamless connectivity by using the wireless network. In the rare event of a fibre outage, this gateway automatically switches to AT&T’s 5G network where available and reverts to fibre when service is restored. While other products on the market offer cellular failover, AT&T’s integrated gateway is unique because it's the first to do so in a single device, underscoring AT&T’s commitment to keeping businesses continuously connected,” according to the telco. Read more. 

Australian telco Telstra has successfully deployed Ericsson’s 5G Advanced Automated Energy Saver (AES), which enables Telstra “to manage network operations based on defined business intents in an advanced, intelligent and automatic fashion,” noted the vendor, adding that “seamless customer experiences are maintained by optimising resources and energy consumption on a real-time basis from observed traffic flows”. Sri Amirthalingam, Telstra’s network engineering executive, stated: “Our collaboration with Ericsson on the Automated Energy Saver (AES) is a key step to start the intent-driven ways of advanced, intelligent and automated networks. The AES feature is showing promising results as we test, validate and optimise the feature in our live commercial network. Our key objective in implementing intent-based solutions is to optimise performance without impacting the experiences of our customers. We look forward to working with Ericsson to introduce additional automated solutions that support our customer experience while improving the efficiency and sustainability of our 5G network.” Read more.

Japanese conglomerate Kyocera, which makes products for the technology, ceramics and medical equipment sectors, is to reduce its stake in KDDI, Japan’s second-largest telco, over the next five years to raise funds that can be used in the core parts of its business, the company noted in its presentation for the first half of its financial year. Kyocera plans to sell a third of its current holding during the next five years and then consider further reductions after that. According to Bloomberg, Kyocera currently holds a 15.3% stake in KDDI that is worth about 1.6tn yen ($10.46bn) at current share price, so a third of that is currently worth in the region of $3.5bn. 

– The staff, TelecomTV