What’s up with... NVIDIA & Arm, T-Mobile, A1 Telekom Austria, Ericsson, Nokia

• Serious concerns over NVIDIA acquisition of Arm
• T-Mobile US data breach even worse than first reported
• Nordic vendors share latest 5G spoils at A1 Telekom Austria

Competition concerns over NVIDIA’s M&A plans and the latest concerning details on T-Mobile US’s customer data breach lead today’s industry news roundup.

NVIDIA’s planned $40 billion acquisition of Arm is going to be harder than expected to complete for the graphics processor giant following the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) determination that the purchase “raises serious competition concerns.” The CMA is “concerned that the merged business would have the ability and incentive to harm the competitiveness of NVIDIA’s rivals by restricting access to Arm’s intellectual property (IP)... Ultimately, the CMA is concerned this loss of competition could stifle innovation across a number of markets, including data centres, gaming, the ‘internet of things’, and self-driving cars. This could result in more expensive or lower quality products for businesses and consumers.” As a result, the CMA believes the proposed deal should be subject to an “in-depth Phase 2 investigation on competition grounds,” a move that would likely result in NVIDIA having to make some firm concessions and promises about how the Arm business is run under its ownership: NVIDIA had offered a “behavioural remedy – a measure which regulates the ongoing behaviour of a business,” but the CMA noted that “this type of remedy would not alleviate its concerns.” Oliver Dowden, the UK government minister who heads up the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), will make the decision about whether a Phase 2 investigation is instigated: The UK government is currently assessing whether the takeover could constitute a threat to the UK’s national security. 

T-Mobile US might be performing well against its peers in 5G metrics, but any positive press from the recent Opensignal report will have been wiped out by the ever worsening reports of the subscriber data breach that has impacted tens of millions of current and former customers. Late last week the operator admitted in this announcement that in addition to the personal details of 40 million former or prospective customers, 850,000 pre-paid customers and 7.8 million current postpaid customers, hackers had also accessed data associated with another 5.3 million postpaid customers and 667,000 former customers, bringing the total number of individuals impacted to about 54 million. T-Mobile admitted also that the postpaid customer stolen data included “phone numbers, as well as IMEI and IMSI information, the typical identifier numbers associated with a mobile phone,” as well as first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information, while other data files were stolen that included phone numbers, IMEI, and IMSI numbers but “no personally identifiable information.” The operator says it’s confident it has “closed off the access and egress points the bad actor used in the attack,” but this security nightmare looks to be far from over for the US operator and it’s hard to imagine it won’t be repeated. Already there are claims online, currently unverified and already discredited, that the data of 70 million AT&T customers is currently being offered for sale by a known hacker with previous form of such activity.   

Nokia has expanded its 5G relationship with the A1 Telekom Austria Group with a deal to its RAN gear for 5G rollouts in Bulgaria, Serbia and Slovenia and its standalone 5G core platform for the deployments in Serbia and Slovenia. The vendor is already providing 5G technology to the operator for its existing 5G network in Austria. The core platform deal in Bulgaria goes to Ericsson, which is also providing RAN and core technology for the operator’s 5G rollout in Croatia. Read more.   

Telia is working with robotics specialist Ekobot to help Swedish farmers eradicate weeds on their land by using 5G-connected autonomous field robots, which can identify and remove rogue plants with the help of advanced camera sensors and AI. Read more.  

Canadian test and measurement company EXFO has taken another step towards delisting and becoming a private company following final approval from the Superior Court of Quebec for the $6.25 per share buyout orchestrated by Germain Lamonde, the company’s founder and majority shareholder, which values the company at $350 million. Following a series of takeover offers (at increasingly higher prices) from Viavi, Lamonde upped his initial $6.00 per share offer ahead of the shareholders’ meeting on 13 August, during which the offer was overwhelmingly approved. 

South Korea’s ICT ministry is taking steps to boost the number of companies developing 5G applications, with the aim of raising the number of local companies specializing in 5G R&D from less than 100 to 1,800, reports the Korea Herald.

Ericsson has been chosen to supply 5G core and RAN equipment to Faroese Telecom, the incumbent operator in the remote Faroe Islands in the north Atlantic, home to about 53,000 people. Read more in this press release about the challenging deployment conditions for the operator and its vendor partner. 

- The staff, TelecomTV