What’s up with… Singtel & Globe, Rakuten Mobile & Allot, Eurofiber

• Singtel and Globe unite for IT services joint venture
• Allot joins Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native crew  
• Eurofiber advances its quantum-safe comms plans

In today’s industry news roundup: Singtel and Global Telecom team up for IT services expansion in South-east Asia; Rakuten Mobile deploys Allot’s solutions on its cloud-native platform; Eurofiber tests quantum key distribution capabilities; and much more!

NCS, the technology services subsidiary of Singtel, has agreed to form a joint venture with Philippines telco Globe Telecom and to acquire a majority stake in Globe’s IT services unit Yondu, a move that will provide Yondu’s enterprise customers with “greater access to digital, cloud, data and AI services,” NCS has announced. The joint venture will scale the Philippines workforce of NCS from 150 to more than 1,200 staff, making it a major technology services player in the country. The new joint venture entity will be renamed NCS Philippines following the closing of the transaction: Financial terms were not disclosed. NCE CEO Ng Kuo Pin stated: “This joint venture marks a significant milestone in our APAC growth journey as we continue to invest to meet the region’s growing demand for technology services, in particular AI-led solutions. Globe and Yondu’s deep country expertise, coupled with NCS’s technology capabilities, will increase our capacity to further drive business transformation and innovation, especially in the telecommunications sector. It will offer greater value to our global clients, who will benefit from our expanded Global Delivery Network,” added the CEO. 

Rakuten Mobile has deployed Network Protection and Deep Network Intelligence solutions from Allot, the Hod Hasharon, Israel-based security-as-a-service (SECaaS) and network intelligence solutions vendor, as part of its migration from a network functions virtualisation (NFV) architecture to a cloud-native platform developed by Rakuten Symphony. The Allot solutions “are now deployed as fully containerised versions in the commercial Rakuten network,” noted the vendor in this announcement. “Rakuten Mobile appreciates the effort that Allot has put into making the migration a smooth process,” stated Ryo Watanabe, general manager of the core network department at Rakuten Mobile. “Throughout the journey, we learned together with Allot as we transitioned the technology into our efficient, customer-centric, cloud-native platform. Partners like Allot, with its comprehensive network protection, management and intelligence solutions, supported the required pace of the migration as it progressed every step of the way,” he added. Dr Oren Kaufman, general manager of Allot Japan, added: “The migration process from NFV to Rakuten Symphony’s cloud-native platform was a feat in itself, in which Allot participated as a close technology partner with Rakuten Mobile. As a part of the Rakuten Mobile blueprint for cloud-native networking services, Allot has displayed an ability to support a top-tier communications service provider in the live cloud-native deployment of its fully containerised solutions, protecting one of the most advanced networks in the world.”

A significant new project in the development of next-generation quantum key distribution (QKD) technology that ensures interference-free data security is underway. The initiative, supported by the European Regional Development Fund, is a joint technology project, called Quest, between EuroFiber, a Dutch provider of open digital infrastructure across its 73,000 kilometre fibreoptic network providing coverage in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany, and another Netherlands company, Q*Bird, a provider of secure quantum communications systems. Q*Bird was spun out of Delft University of Technology in 2022 and provides innovative datacoms and digital infrastructure technology that is provably secure against the future deployment of quantum computers and multiple quantum networks. The Quest project has been granted a €1m subsidy from Kansen voor West (Opportunities for the West), a Dutch regional funding initiative designed to drive economic development, innovation and sustainability. Quest will enable QKD across two of Eurofiber’s major datacentres in the Randstad region of the Netherlands. The Randstad, (which means Edge City in English), is one of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas and home to almost 50% of the country’s population. It connects and comprises the Netherlands’ four biggest cities, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht plus their suburbs, and all the towns in between. The Randstad is comparable in population to the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region in Germany or the San Francisco Bay Area. According to Marc Hulzebos, innovation manager at Eurofiber, “by permanently enabling quantum key distribution across our Randstad datacentres and our private cloud infrastructure, we are not just enhancing security for our customers today but also laying the groundwork for future quantum network services”. Q*Bird is developing next-generation QKD quantum networking technology, with the goal of scaling the technology to a more commercially viable application. The Quest project will see multiple smaller QKD networks being connected to permit quantum encrypted communication between any pair of users in an extended quantum network. Ingrid Romijn, the CEO of Q*Bird commented, “We are building devices for quantum-secured data communications and this project will allow us to significantly enhance our business proposition for a wide range of customers. In the future, we will enable general-purpose quantum connectivity by providing new products and seamlessly integrating those with our pre-existing quantum cryptography network across datacentres.” Read more. 

The latest action in the satellite-to-smartphone communications sector involves Lynk Global, which has reportedly partnered with MTN South Africa to make a successful voice call via Lynk low-earth orbit satellites, using standard smartphones. The news comes only days after Lynk announced it had completed successful tests with Turkcell in Turkey. 

Microsoft has reportedly scrapped two massive datacentre capacity expansion projects, one in the US and one in Europe, in the past few months as it recalculates the resources it will need in the near future, according to Reuters, which cited an analyst note from investment bank TD Cowen. The decision comes as investors question whether the enormous spending plans of hyperscalers and tech giants on AI infrastructure is merited, though Reuters notes that Microsoft is sticking by its plan to invest $80bn in datacentre infrastructure and capacity during its current financial year.

On a related note… Indications are that the Chinese government will soon intervene in the country’s datacentre sector. Back in late 2022, when ChatGPT and AI suddenly exploded onto the world stage, China’s central government quickly defined the construction and deployment of AI infrastructure as a national priority. Local governments across all of China’s provinces and special zones were instructed immediately to develop what were called ‘smart computing centres’ – a phrase that actually meant datacentres focused entirely on AI. Between 2023 and 2024, 500 new such datacentres were planned, of which, according to the China Communications Industry Association Data Centre Committee, at least 150 were also built between 2023 and 2024. Construction is continuing apace even as the AI sector evolves away from mass large language model (LLM) development. Last year, some 146 companies registered with China’s national internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, with plans to develop their own LLMs. However, as China’s Economic Observer publication has revealed, only about 10% of those companies were still investing in the LLM training model by January this year. The boom is rapidly turning to bust with the estimable MIT Technology Review reporting that many of the new datacentre facilities are lying fallow. That claim is supported by Jiazi Guangnian, the Chinese operator of an enterprise service platform that provides technology and consulting services with an emphasis on AI. Its research shows that some 80% of China’s newly built computing resources remain unused. The net result is that many datacentres built at the height of the AI infrastructure boom are now being classified as distressed assets as panicky loss-making investors try to offload them at fire-sale prices. Things have become so bad that the Chinese government is standing by to take over and “hand them off to more capable operators”. The reason for the sudden change is being laid squarely at the door of China’s privately owned DeepSeek R1, the free open-source, AI-powered chatbot which, whilst ostensibly very similar to ChatGPT, is a “reasoning AI model” that provides responses incrementally and, in so doing, simulates human thought processes. This logical step-by-step approach to provide answers to user questions appears to be meeting the needs of Chinese companies that have, since the emergence of DeepSeek, decided they no longer need to train their own LLMs. Until now, datacentre companies have made their money by renting graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters to enterprises that require computing capacity for AI training, but the launch of DeepSeek has suppressed that demand and is causing a shift in technology requirements. GPUs from companies such as Nvidia are designed for massive data processing for LLMs, and prioritise speed and memory capacity. However, as AI trends shift more towards real-time reasoning, cheaper chips will be sufficient to do the job. That’s why the price of GPU rentals is falling. MIT Technology Review cites a report from the Chinese media outlet Zhineng Yongxian as saying that an Nvidia H100 server configured with eight GPUs now rents for 75,000 yuan ($10,320) per month, down from highs of around 180,000 yuan ($24,770) just a few months ago.

– The staff, TelecomTV