What’s up with… Mavenir, DISH, Vodafone, AT&T, Orange

• Mavenir lands OpenRAN deals with DISH and Vodafone Idea
• Vodafone Germany outlines 5G expansion plans
• AT&T’s sales slip as it starts cutting costs

Here’s what caught our eye on the wires today:

• Mavenir has landed two additional customers for its disaggregated OpenRAN systems in the form of India’s Vodafone Idea and DISH Network in the US. While Vodafone Idea is a fixture of the Indian mobile scene, DISH is building a new 5G network as it aims to become the country’s fourth major cellular player. "Mavenir will help us lay the foundation for an innovative software-defined network with the flexibility, intelligence and scalability to deliver applications that will redefine the U.S. wireless industry,” noted Marc Rouanne, DISH's Chief Network Officer.   

• Germany’s operators are battling for 5G bragging rights supremacy, with Vodafone announcing it is using its 700MHz spectrum to make 5G services available to 10 million people across the country, including rural areas. Like rival Deutsche Telekom, which has also just revealed its 5G expansion plans, Vodafone Germany is putting Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to work. 

• In the US, AT&T reported a 4.5% year-on-year dip in first quarter revenues to $42.8 billion, a decline largely attributed to the loss of video and wirelines subscribers. The operator also announced during its earnings call that a $6 billion cost-cutting plan is now underway, starting with a revamp of its retail distribution network and changes to its field operations (including a greater reliance on self-install processes by customers and greater AI-enabled efficiencies in truck rolls). See this press release and this earnings call transcript for more details.  

• Ever keen to explore new business opportunities, Orange has teamed up in Spain with Zurich to offer insurance services to its customers starting in the second half of this year. Orange has long been looking to add financial services to its mix and boasted more than 500,000 users for its Orange Bank services at the end of last year. 

• There were more than 70 million FTTH/B customers across Europe at the end of September 2019, while the number of homes passed grew to nearly 172 million, according to the latest statistics gathered by research house IDATE and shared by the FTTH Council Europe. For the full details, see this announcement. 

• China Unicom reported a 2.3% year-on-year increase in service revenues for the first quarter of 2020 to RMB 68.3 billion ($9.65 billion) but a near 14% dip in profits to RMB 3.17 billion ($448 million). It also revealed its mobile subscriber base dipped by nearly 7.5 million during the first three months of this year to 311 million, and while it’s happy to boast of 254.5 million 4G users, it isn’t giving any 5G subscriber numbers just yet. 

• Blue Planet, the automation software division of Ciena, says it has contributed code and functionality to the Linux Foundation’s open source Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) Policy Framework. Check out this announcement for more details. 

• What do US smartphone users do when they’re home on lockdown? They go online via Wi-Fi, that’s what. According to Opensignal which monitors this sort of thing, time on Wi-Fi is an early indicator of behavioral changes. Smartphone users in badly virus-hit New York, Newark and Jersey City, increased the average amount of time they spent connected to a Wi-Fi network from 53.4% to 60.1% between the second and third weeks of March, rising to 64.7% in the first week of April.

• The staff, TelecomTV

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