What’s up with… Jio Platforms, Rakuten Mobile, 5G rankings

• India’s Jio Platforms attracts more investment
• Rakuten Mobile shares 5G core migration plans
• South Korea tops 5G market ranking

Further investment in Jio Platforms, the parent company of India’s leading mobile operator, and insightful 5G core migration commentary from Japan’s Rakuten Mobile are the pick of today’s news bunch.

• Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor Mubadala has splashed out INR90.936 billion ($1.2 billion) on a 1.85% stake in Jio Platforms, which includes India’s leading mobile operator Reliance Jio among its digital assets. In the past six weeks, Jio Platforms has raised more than INR876 billion ($11.6 billion) from the sale of stakes to Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR and now Mubadala. Jio Platforms isn’t the only mobile player in India to have attracted the interest of investors recently, as Amazon has been linked to a potential investment in Bharti Airtel, while Google is reportedly mulling a stake in Vodafone Idea.
• Rakuten Mobile aims to converge its virtualized 4G core platform into its cloud native standalone 5G core within 16 months of launching RCP (Rakuten Communications Platform), the containerized 5G core platform being developed with NEC, reports Keith Dyer at The Mobile Network. Rakuten announced this week that it plans to offer its 5G core code to other operators as an application made available via the RCP marketplace. 
• South Korea was the world’s leading 5G market at the end of 2019, followed by Kuwait, according to research house Omdia, which ranked countries based on a set of criteria that included operator launches, population coverage and service take-up. Switzerland (ranked third overall) and the UK (ranked sixth globally) were the leading 5G markets in Europe. 
• The European Commission has outlined funding proposals for its €8.2 billion Digital Europe initiative, which will start in January 2021 and run through to 2027. It includes €2.2 billion for AI investments and €1.8 billion for cybersecurity investments. The details came shortly after the German government announced a €130 billion stimulus package that includes support for 5G network rollouts.
• Telecom Italia, which had more than 45,000 staff at the end of last year, is set to reduce its headcount by a further 700 positions this year, reports Reuters, taking the total planned number of job losses at the operator for this year to 3,400. 
• VMware is to acquire cybersecurity threat intelligence specialist Lastline for an unspecified sum.
• FTTH now accounts for 51.7% of fixed broadband connections in Portugal. The country, which has a fixed broadband penetration rate of 81.5%, had 4 million fixed broadband connections at the end of March, according to regulator Anacom, of which 2.1 million were over fibre lines.
• SpaceX has launched a further 60 Starlink broadband connectivity satellites into orbit. There are now 482 Starlink satellites in space, taking the Elon Musk initiative closer to being able to offer commercial broadband services to underserved areas around the world.
• Mavenir has added new features to Mobile Business Contact, its cloud-hosted, contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) solution.
• SK Telecom has invested a further $20 million in Nanox, a medical imaging technology company.

- The staff, TelecomTV