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Vodafone suppliers must give bottom line a good greenwash before meeting CDP

Nick Booth
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Vodafone suppliers must give bottom line a good greenwash before meeting CDP

Aim for zero emissions

UK mobile operator Vodafone has launched a new programme that gives preferential financing to suppliers with environmental kudos. Vodafone already asks suppliers to meet environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets in health and safety, diversity and the environment. Now it is raising the supply chain bar. In addition to the new green course, some suppliers must also complete an annual CDP survey that scores them on environmental performance. However, some in the supply chain suggest there are plenty of changes that telcos could do to cut their own needless emissions, such as eliminating pointless equipment.

The new programme is being run in partnership with a company that doesn’t face the same pressure as the small businesses in the supply chain, the not-for-profit organisation CDP. A founding member of the Science Based Targets initiative, We Mean Business Coalition, The Investor Agenda and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, CDP has now been given the responsibility to encourage industry-wide adoption of its sustainability model. It has been charged with persuading even more suppliers to report on environmental performance and reduce carbon emissions.

Some of the world’s largest telecoms suppliers are now able to access preferential supply chain financing rates for disclosing emissions data and operating their businesses more sustainably. CDP operates globally running an environmental disclosure system that helps financial institutions, companies, cities, states and regions to measure and manage their environmental impact.

In partnership with Vodafone it has developed a course consisting of 12 jumps, AKA criteria taken a survey, relating specifically to greenhouse gas emissions in the supply chain. These are to be the basis for a new environmentally-linked supply chain finance programme. Vodafone said suppliers will be invited to share their environmental performance score with their supply chain financing provider, and in doing so will have the opportunity to receive preferential financing rates based on their ranking.

The framework will initially be offered to suppliers, taking advantage of Vodafone’s supply chain finance programme through Citi. Vodafone will open the framework to a wider variety of suppliers and their supply chain financing providers later this year. Vodafone said the preferential supply chain financing rates will encourage suppliers to submit data on their environmental performance, reduce their carbon emissions overall, and ultimately contribute towards the Group’s Scope 3 emissions targets. This aims to cut emissions that aren’t directly produced by the company, but are linked to its business activity.

No emissions figures were available for the extra work involved in compiling and creatively accounting for net zero targets. In future, CDP plans to make a template of the framework available to other players in the telecoms sector, with a view to driving industry-wide adoption of the model.

CDP was founded in 2000 and works with 741 financial institutions with over $130 trillion in assets. It pioneered the concept of using capital markets and corporate procurement to motivate companies to disclose their environmental impact. It claims this makes them reduce greenhouse gas emissions, safeguard water resources and protect forests.

Now around 20,000 organisations around the world disclosed data through CDP in 2022, including more than 18,700 companies worth half of global market capitalisation, and over 1,100 cities, states and regions. It holds the largest environmental database in the world, in servers that need to be powered and cooled by high maintenance electricity and temperature management systems. CDP scores are widely used to drive investment and procurement decisions towards a zero carbon, sustainable and resilient economy.

DAS makes Totemic debut at Orange Vélodrome, notching 5Gs for Olympique de Marseille

Nick Booth
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DAS makes Totemic debut at Orange Vélodrome, notching 5Gs for Olympique de Marseille

It’s a box of tricks this DAS

European tower company Totem yesterday unveiled a new star performer in Orange Vélodrome, the home of France’s most fanatical sports followers, the notorious ultras of Olympique de Marseille. French mobile operator Orange is creating a new generation of networks for the sensation-seekers with an exciting array of talents. The new addition has instant reaction times, high capacity and fantastic load juggling skills, through a talent known in the game as network slicing. Scouts from the UK say Vélodrome network is so agile it could turn on a sixpence.

Quand tout le vélodrome

The Orange Vélodrome now has the most electrified atmosphere of any stadium in France and is, according to Orange, top of Ligue 1 in 5G connectivity. This is particularly important to meet the high expectations of real fans, corporate seat bandwagon jumpers, and the media ahead of major sports events such as the next Olympique de Marseille matches and international competitions.

Reprend comme un seul homme

The totemic network owes much to its wingers, the antenna that lay at the periphery of the network and give it its pace and edge. The Distributed Antenna System (DAS) infrastructure uses a new  breed of antennas designed specifically for venues with high mobile phone usage to provide consistent, high-quality network coverage and high levels of energy efficiency.

La chanson du virage qui résonne

This network of private pooled antennas has been made available to all operators to provide all their mobile services simultaneously, while ensuring that Orange Vélodrome teams have a single, neutral point of contact. Through this pooling, TOTEM meets the expectations of the Orange Vélodrome in terms of optimizing the equipment footprint and allows operators to consume less energy.

Que le virage se mette a chanter

The four French operators, Bouygues Télécom, Free Mobile, Orange and SFR, connected today their equipment to the antenna infrastructure used by TOTEM and can now offer 5G to their end customers within the Orange Vélodrome. As a Tower Company, Totem has surprised many while seemingly being played out of position, but it has fulfilled the role of integrator by linking up four major operators. Thierry Papin, CEO of TOTEM France. Said it’s vital that all its operator customers have access to the infrastructure, allowing them to operate their respective networks in the best conditions.

C’est tout le stade qui va s’enflammer

“Connecting an indoor environment to the latest generation of 5G, which can be used by almost 68,000 people at the same time, is a real technical challenge” said Papin. The equipment deployed by Totem is the same successfully used at major competitions in the US Papin said, but Orange Vélodrome is the first stadium in France to have such advanced 5G connectivity.

Allez, allez, as the Marseille fans say

Totem is Orange’s european tower subsidiary with 27,000 tower sites, flat roofs and other sites in pain and France. As a neutral player, it connects and hosts systems for operators and urges them to share infrastructure, whenever it makes sense, it says. It describes its best position as being a link up player, sitting in between operators, regional authorities and businesses.

Mobile app with AI makes interventions about your smoking intentions

Nick Booth
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Mobile app with AI makes interventions about your smoking intentions

Could cure screen addition

A mobile app with artificial intelligence can sense where and when you might be triggered to light up a cigarette, says University of East Anglia research, which claims the interfering machine may make user stop smoking eventually. On the other hand, the constant annoying interventions might encourage users to put their phone away and switch it off. Either way, researchers at the University of East Anglia have found a way for smart phone users to deal with one of their addictions.

The app that Quit Sense is pioneering is the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) stop smoking app which detects when people are entering a location they used to smoke in, such as Chinatown in London (pictured), which was once a popular destination for UK technology journalists on a Friday night. The AI application then provides support to help manage people’s specific smoking triggers in that location.

Funding for the Quit Sense app has come from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Medical Research Council. A study published today shows how the new app helped more smokers to quit than people who were only offered online NHS support. The team hope that by helping people manage trigger situations, the new app will help more smokers to quit.

“Quit attempts often fail because urges to smoke are triggered by spending time in places where people used to smoke. This might be while at the pub or at work, for example,” said lead researcher Prof Felix Naughton, from UEA’s School of Health Sciences. “Other than using medication, there are no existing ways of providing support to help smokers manage these types of situations and urges as they happen.

Dr Chloë Siegele-Brown from the University of Cambridge built the app and described the rationale of Quit Sense using AI to learns about the times, locations and triggers of previous smoking events to decide when and what messages to display to the users to help them manage urges to smoke in real time.

Prof Naughton did not think that reverse psychology might be at play in this game of cat and mouse. “Helping people attempting to quit smoking to learn about and manage these situations is a new way of increasing a smoker’s chances of quitting successfully,” said Naughton.

The research team carried out a randomised controlled trial involving 209 smokers who were recruited via social media. They were sent links by text message to access their allocated treatment, all participants received a link to NHS online stop smoking support but only half received the Quit Sense app in addition.

Six months later, the participants were asked to complete follow-up measures online and those reporting to have quit smoking were asked to post back a saliva sample to verify their abstinence. “We found that when smokers were offered the Quit Sense app, three-quarters installed it and those who started a quit attempt with the app used it for around one month on average,” said Professor Naughton, “We also found that four times more people who were offered the app quit smoking six months later compared to those only offered online NHS support.”

The research team note that one limitation of this relatively small-scale study was that less than half of the people who reported quitting smoking returned a saliva sample to verify that they had quit smoking. And more research is needed to provide a better estimate of the effectiveness of the app.

Quit Sense application makes interventions about your smoking intentions

“Technology and smartphones have a role to play in driving down smoking rates, which is why I’ve set out our plans to explore the use of QR codes in cigarette pack inserts to take people to stop-smoking support,” said UK Health Minister Neil O’Brien. “Making better use of technology – alongside the world’s first national ‘swap to stop’ scheme and financial incentives for pregnant women alongside behavioural support – will help us to meet our smokefree ambition by 2030, reduce the number of smoking-illnesses needing to be treated, and cut NHS waiting times.”

This study was led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Norwich Clinical Trials Unit, the University of Nottingham, King’s College London, University College London, and Imperial College London.

An automated, online feasibility randomised controlled trial of a Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention for smoking cessation (Quit Sense) is published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

S&T Iskratel stuns FTTH conference, striking terabits into heart of network

Nick Booth
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S&T Iskratel stuns FTTH conference, striking terabits into heart of network

PON OLT shootout

Mobile network operators could save endless time and money on hardware when virtualizing and upgrading their fibre networks thank to a new multi-terabit Optical Line Terminal (OLTs) invention from Slovenian mobile network operator S&T Iskratel. Like all great engineering, it hides the complexity and empowers the user with an easy modus operandum that makes the user feel empowered.

The equipment pulls off three major coups. Its versatility creates long term continuity, because it can accommodate the full variety of technology options likely to present themselves in the near future. It’s designed to pack in more ports, offering connectivity on an unprecedented scale. Thirdly, it has fine-tuned Passive Optical networking to create a capacity that smashes all data speed records.

The Kranj-based telco in the Central European republic unveiled the equipment at the FTTH Conference in Madrid, on April 18th. It is capable of uploading at 1.4 Tbps, making the Iskratel Lumia T6 the world’s fastest shelf-based PON OLT.

The time and money savings fo MNOs come from its ability to smoothly upgrade in the same chassis when new PON generations are available. With 800 Gbps per subscriber blade and 3.4 Tbps switching capacity, Iskratel Lumia T6 will easily support 50GPON and 100GPON, in addition to current 10-gigabit PON technologies such as Combo PON and XGS-PON.

The company has launched an extra-scalable, high-density OLT called the Iskratel Lumia T14, which can host present and future PON technologies. While Iskratel Lumia T6 can serve over 20,000 users with its 80/64 ports, the bigger Iskratel Lumia T14 can provide PON connectivity to more than 50,000 users with its 208/192 Combo PON ports.

High speeds are one thing but it’s the convenience of parading the networks without tear of frustration that will appeal. Better still, the technology has given telcos the option to increase the overall number of subscribers in both urban and rural locations.

As video conferencing, 4K video streaming, gaming and cloud storage rapidly become all the rage, they creating a booming demand for data rates for a reliable performance, according to Simon Čimžar, CTO, Business Unit Broadband at S&T Iskratel. “The outstanding uplink capacities of our new OLTs are the fastest way to unlocking a greener future,” said Čimžar. Complying with the gren future is not hat easy, since t involves meeting the pernickety demands of the EU Code of Conduct on Energy Consumption of Broadband Equipment, which is fundamental in enabling operators to reduce energy costs and their impact on the environment.

“The new OLTs can support today’s technologies and tomorrow’s inventions,” said Čimžar, it allows for virtualszed operation on the same hardware which guarantees the return and safety of investment from operators.” The temperature range is accommodating too. Servers can function anywhere from minus 40 °C to +65 °C means that S&T Iskratel’s Lumia OLTs can run in the warmth of the Central Office and out in the cold in a street cabinet.

The new additions to the portfolio will be exclusively showcased at the FTTH Conference in Madrid, from 18th to 20th April 2023. S&T Iskratel’s experts will be on hand at stand G12 to provide further insight.

Telcos must kill zombies breeding in the cloud – Red Hat

Nick Booth
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Telcos must kill zombies breeding in the cloud – Red Hat

They run up huge bills and upset users

Mobile network operators are burning fossil fuels and running up huge power bills in thrall to Zombie Computers, rogue servers that could be too risky to take out, according to a Red Hat expert who warned that cloud computing will offer unproductive machinery an even more effective screen from which to hide. Zombie-hunter Holly Cummins, Quarkus senior principal software engineer at RedHat, shared her ‘Kill Bill’ tips with developers with Q Con London. The top line is that the use of applications like FinOps and LightSwitchOps could immediately save telcos a fortune and halt customer defections.

Cummins said a zombie is a box that’s served no information or computing for at least six months. They are not just legacy boxes hiding in a nest of cables but surprisingly modern systems whose presence is undocumented. There’s the legendary Kubernetes cluster schmuck that consumed thousands of dollars for no apparent reason. Sometimes there’ll be ‘orphans’ that nobody claims ownership of. They’re impossible to see and even harder to measure.

A study found that most energy in US data centres powered 12 million servers that do nothing most of the time. On average a server uses 15% capacity and 45% max power. In 2021, 26.6 billion dollars was wasted in the public cloud in one year with always-on cloud resources.

According to sustainability experts at the Antithesis Institute, some people forget to turn off servers while others over-estimate the services, projected ends, change in business processes and isolation needs. Under-used servers might only run batch jobs on the weekend or certain systems during business hours but they’re on and being cooled 24/7. Automatic scaling could solve that but few people bother. Why take the risk when there’s no reward? They would if telcos had a green programme.

But the zombies pass under the radar, according to Cummins. Efficiency algorithms are not relevant for zombies, so you must seek and destroy them. Cummins gave some pointers: Try a scream test. Another technique is tagging, providing meta-data for future review, which is a manual process and only sometimes clear. Operational tools like GreenOps and AIOps and LightSwitchOps can turn off a server and sets it up like a light switch. This must be fast and reliable though.

Scripts can turn servers on and off. GitOps, where infrastructure is recreated as code, can spin servers up and down. GitOps could be an alternative to systems that require redundancy. 

The problem could get worse, warned Cummins. The cloud, virtualisation and serverless computing make zombies invisible. Prevention through heavy governance does not help. 

It’s not just servers that are zombies, there’s ‘demonic’ data and even spectral network traffic, unhappy packets that roam the infrastructure and never reach their destination. Together they comprise the banshee-like internet background noise.

Tools like Quarkus can start up faster than an LED light bulb but they only solve half the problem, the other half being the processes and infrastructure that make organizations reluctant to stop and start servers. So zombie servers may proliferate in the age of cloud computing.

In March cloud data manager Veritas Technologies, unveiled new research that showed that half (51%) of consumers said they were furious that online data storage wastes energy and produces environmental pollution when, on average, half of the data enterprises store is redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) and another 35% is dark with unknown value. More ominously half of consumers (47%) said they would stop buying from a company if they knew it was wilfully causing environmental damage by failing to control how much unnecessary or unwanted data it is storing.

Escalating Cyber attacks on Israeli telcos are ‘Anony-muscovite’

Nick Booth
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Escalating Cyber attacks on Israeli telcos are ‘Anony-muscovite’

Moscow and Tehran unmasked

A new hacker group calling itself Anonymous Sudan attacked the websites of Israel’s national mail service and major banks in April reveals The Times of Israel.  The group co-ordinated a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, which managed to temporarily overwhelms the servers of Israeli private and public bodies in an assault seemingly timed to coincide with a day of Iranian-promoted anti-Israel events. Though attack was quickly contained, Israeli authorities said, with no harm or data leaks, the websites of two telecoms and more banks later went down. The cyber assault on Israeli telcos is not over, the report said, as the hidden hand of Moscow, pictured, is thought to be behind the attacks. This would only mean a step up in cyber terror tactics on Israel’s comms services.

The attack was claimed by a group of hackers that goes by Anonymous Sudan, according to Hebrew media reports, citing a telegram message posted by the shadowy collective. The National Cyber Directorate said the site for Israel’s national mail service was back up and running after a few minutes. Bank Mizrachi’s page was down for half an hour, with only “occasional interruptions,” it said.

The hackers did not gain access to internal documents or files, but merely the customer-facing interface. A short time later the websites for the Hot cable service provider and 012 mobile carrier went down, with the group claiming responsibility for those as well. The attacks coincided with the marking of Quds Day, an Iran-promoted event featuring virulently anti-Israel marches and rallies in Tehran another hotspots. Hackers have used the occasion of Quds Day to attack Israeli institutions in the past.

In recent months, Anonymous Sudan has claimed several short-lasting attacks on government services, healthcare and other operations in European countries. Some experts have speculated they may be linked to Russia’s Killnet hacking group rather than Sudan.

Iranian-Russian cooperation on hack attacks may challenge Israeli cyber supremacy since Moscow as helped Tehran to gain cyber warfare functions after years of being stymied

Now websites of Israeli banks, telecom firms, the postal service are being taken down by hackers.

The attacks are nothing now. For years, the last Friday of Ramadan, dedicated to anti-Israel rallies championed by Iran under the banner of Jerusalem Day, has been accompanied by hacker groups trying to disrupt Israeli life. As in previous years, Friday’s cyberattack caused minor service interruptions according to Israeli authorities. What is significant, say Times of Israel staff, is that the authors of the attacks has changed, they have greater potential for damage and the terrorists have a more sinister message to give Israel.

Anonymous Sudan is thought to have no meaningful connection to the Anonymous hacking collective or the Saharan country currently locked in deadly civil strife. Rather, experts believe the group has strong links to Russia, and given Iran’s prominent role in directing anti-Israel activity to mark Jerusalem Day, many see its fingerprints behind the cyber-assault as well. If confirmed, Iranian-Russian cooperation in cyberspace would mark a new stage in the long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran, which has largely been waged in computer code. “Such a breakthrough would significantly affect the regional balance-of-power, in favour of the Islamic Republic.” Said the report.

Cyberwarfare between Iran and Israel has escalated over the last six years. Israel, determined to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and advanced missile capabilities, is understood to have been behind cyberattacks that have disrupted the functioning of the Islamic Republic and have caused damage to Iranian installations. Among the best-known instances was the 2010 Stuxnet bug, which was credited with destroying centrifuges being used to develop Iran’s nuclear program. The attacks have continued since then.

Iran is also determined to build up its cyber defences to respond to Israeli hacking and initiate its own attacks. A 2020 cyberattack targeting Israeli water facilities was probably the first Iranian foray into the cyber war. Israel’s cyber defenses have so far prevented major damage, but Tehran has not given up trying. With military cooperation between Tehran and Moscow already ramping up against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, it would seem fitting for the Islamic Republic to turn to Russia in order to upgrade its cyber capabilities and seek opportunities for a joint-initiatives.

Most of the cyberattacks carried out by Israel and Iran against each other to date appear to be forms of psychological warfare, operations aimed at influencing public opinion in the target country to put pressure on the ruling regime, or to spark destabilising protests.

 Such attacks usually do not cause irreversible damage to the targets or end with innocent civilians being killed. The list of soft targets thought hacked by Iran in recent years includes The Technion — Israel Institute of Technology (2023), rocket alert sirens which were set off in Jerusalem and Eilat (2022), breached security cameras (2022), the LGBTQ website Atraf (2021), and the Shirbit insurance company (2020).

Anonymous Sudan first began taking credit for hack attacks in January, and has seemingly focused on targeting European countries in retaliation for perceived anti-Muslim activity. Experts have noted that most Telegram messages from Anonymous Sudan are in Russian or English and have linked the group to Russian hacker gang Killnet, which has launched DDoS attacks in European countries that back Ukraine. Killnet and Anonymous Sudan also often amplify each other’s messages on social media. In February, Killnet published a message from Anonymous Sudan claiming to have taken down the website of Israeli cybersecurity firm Radware.

Intensified cyber cooperation between Iran and Russia poses a threat to Israel, the United States, and their allies. Russia, not Iran, is in the driver’s seat in terms of defining how far the cooperation goes, and could be pressured to limit it. While Russia has ignored Israeli lobbying vis-a-vis cooperation with Iran in the past, it could be threatened by the prospect of Tehran using its cyber prowess against Moscow in the future. “So long as Russia and Iran are still hacking it together, Israel should be prepared to deal with cyber onslaughts that could cause real trouble,” said the Times of Israel leader.

MEA telcos must tip the hyperscales or miss the sales – report

Nick Booth
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MEA telcos must tip the hyperscales or miss the sales – report

Big Tech’s got the market rigged

African, Middle Eastern and Europe telcos must work with hyperscalers if they want access to the digital consumer service markets, for which businesses and consumers will a collective $513 bn by 2027, claims analyst Omdia. If telcos don’t work with hyperscalers they’ll have more chance of finding growth in the dead sea (pictured) according to the report, because the environment outside the operators is too barren to sustain growth.

In its report Quantifying the Consumer Telco Opportunity – 2023 it claims that new demand for the likes of digital gaming, online video, messaging apps, smart home services and digital music will by 5-21% in the next five years. While the volumes will be overshadowed by mainstream services like mobile data, fixed broadband and pay TV, the new services will have much more lucrative profit margins than the commodity services, for which telcos will have to fight for every penny of revenue.

It’s better to have a easy euro in profit than an arduous ARPU according to report author Jonathan Doran, principal analyst for digital consumer operator strategy at Omdia. The five new markets will not only add half a trillion dollars to earnings but, if operators target their efforts wisely, they could find excelling in the two fastest growing markets, digital gaming and online video.

Additionally, there are indications that strong future potential for operators lie in developing the right e-health and financial services for clients. Several telcos have already began investing in these areas, a case in point being Vodacom South Africa, whose financial services and lifestyle super app VodaPay which has more than 1.1 million monthly active users (MAUs) since launching in 2021. VodaPay was responsible for a 30.6% rise in financial services revenue for Vodacom Group in the last three months of 2022.

Doran urged service operators to look beyond data and diversify into adjacent digital markets to enable continued growth of their telco consumer businesses. While many telcos have already invested in TV and online video entertainment, Doran suggested that there are other fast-growing markets that operators can explore.

The problem is thar hyperscalers are likely to get there first and there are many in the industry who say big tech players like Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple are masters at rigging markets. The only way to get a piece of the action will be to form a pact with the colonists, because they cannot be beaten.

While Germany’s regulator has teeth enough to investigate charges of ant-competitive behaviour and market rigging by Apple, Microsoft and Google, in theUK it has been a completely different story. In April the UK Competitionand Markets Authority was prevented from investigating Apple’s tactics because Apple’s lawyers objected.

“In many areas, telcos will need to accept that competing head-on is unrealistic and developing partnerships with such players is not only more pragmatic but will also serve to strengthen their own products and brands,” said Doran.

The more actively the mobile network operators invest in a given service area, through partnerships, the bigger market impact they have, said Doran. “In turn this gives a better position them to take a bigger slice of overall market revenue,” said Doran.

Omdia’s report and related recommendations are far from unexpected, as many global telco players already have a flair for the possibilities in the realm of digital offerings. Middle East telco giant e& recently agreed to spend $400m for a majority stake in Uber’s Careem Super App to deliver digital services, including food and grocery delivery, fintech offerings and a digital wallet among many more.

In another recent move, UK operator BT asked Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help it launch 4G and 5g edge trials. Without AWS BT would miss out on the chance to bid fforan estimated $500m revenue from Internet of things (IoT) and 5G edge computing.

In January AWS said it was building 32 AWS Local Zones worldwide and intends to build 24 more: they are designed to enable businesses within countries to shift more workloads to cloud. They do this by providing “a hybrid cloud migration strategy and simplifying IT processes”. These include an AWS Local Zone in Lagos, Nigeria, having opened its first office in the city last November.

BT war gamed its supply chain over Taiwan tensions as chips looked down

Nick Booth
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BT war gamed its supply chain over Taiwan tensions as chips looked down

But is China just Biden its time?

UK telco BT has used its knowledge of monopolist tactics to ‘war game’ the various nightmare options for its own supply chain should tensions escalate between China and Taiwan. For two days last year it simulated a range of disasters while US speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, an apparent publicity stunt which China interpreted as an act of aggression. The atmosphere of escalating tension led Dublin-based procurement staff at BT to carry out  simulations, AKA war games, in which they examined the impact of a variety of responses to the conflict in the region escalating further, the Financial Times (FT) claimed on Sunday. 

This revelation is further evidence that telcos are making preparations against a backdrop of growing tension in the region, following the supply chain disruption caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. BT claimed the war games were nothing new and that it regularly runs simulations – “to stress test our business.” The telecoms company has so far not responded to inquiries for more details. China has been carrying out military drills around Taiwan, which it claims as part of its territory. According to CityAM it stepped up the drills in the area around Taiwan earlier this month in response to Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, meeting US house speaker Kevin McCarthy in California. 

Any disruption to supply chains caused by a conflict would hit industries reliant upon semiconductors particularly hard, since Taiwan produces the majority of semiconductors globally. Taiwan produces over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and over 90% of the most advanced ones. One company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), holds 53% of the global foundry market for semiconductors alone, according to US government research.

Intel’s European chief Frans Scheper previously warned that if China shut off Taiwan’s exports it could cause a major crisis. The US Chips and Science Act, passed in August 2022, contains over $200 billion to bolster US semiconductor industries and reduce reliance on global supply chains. The UK’s own House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee has previously carried out a review urging the UK government to increase the resilience of UK supply chains in its semiconductor strategy. However, in what cold be a grim omen, the report not yet been published.

Meanwhile, however, the Sunday Times has reported that a low ranking 21-year-old US airman, Jack Teixeira, was given access to confidential data on top secret military missions in Ukraine, which included data shared by UK spy agency MI6, and leaked it to a discord server, where it was not spotted by US intelligence agencies until they read about the breach in the New York Times. The US now shares more confidential data with the Chinese than it does with its supposed allies, according to some security analysts. The BT War Games strategy is unlikely to have planned for that eventuality.

Finns consume ten gigs per second with Quillion chips – so why doesn’t Valoo backbone ever pile on the carbon?

Nick Booth
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Finns consume ten gigs per second with Quillion chips – so why doesn’t Valoo backbone ever pile on the carbon?

You can never be too rich or too Finn

Nokia has announced that it is running a 10G broadband network for operator Valoo in Finland. The deal includes fibre access nodes for the central office and Nokia’s Altiplano broadband access controller, which includes software defined access networking (SDAN) capabilities. The new network will connect 200,000 homes in and around 30 cities by the end of 2026. With Nokia’s Quillion (see picture below) chipset at the heart of the solution, the XGS-PON installation is ready for passive optical networking shifting data at 25 gigabits per second come the time when Valoo chooses to add more capacity.

Valoo CEO Tommi Linna that that the key to the health of Finnish mobile operators is a strong lithe backbone with minimal carbs (carbon dioxide emissions). Nokia’s Lightspan multi-gig fibre broadband is the solution to its problems. Linna said the techniques used by Nokia’s infrastructure surgeons and the aftercare offered by its photonic therapists enables multiple customers to use the same limbs of fibre. This dilates the capacity for connections and boosts the circulation of data, the lifeblood of any information dependent body, to 20 gigabits per second and beyond.

With the insert of Nokia’s new Altiplano controller the Finnish communications service provider can offer advanced open access networks to the consumers of one of the world’s healthiest economies. “Nokia’s multi-gig fibre has a 95 per cent smaller carbon footprint thanks to its energy efficiency gains compared to traditional point-to-point solutions. I couldn’t be more proud that we are the first fibre company in Finland offering multi-gig connections to customers from spring,” said Linna. Finland’s information economy foundation is one of Europe’s best funded public resources. According to Visit Finland, research shows that people of Valoo and Helsinki (pictured above) are the happiest in the world. This could be related to the well ordered infrastructure described in Nokia’s statement, that provides the right work life balance.

Valoo (Adola Oy) is wholly-owned by DIF Capital Partners, an independent infrastructure equity fund controlling more than €15 billion of investments globally. Valoo focuses on fibre broadband access and is embarking on ambitious large scale installations in the Finnish market. In February this year the company announced that in addition to building fibre networks it will offer its own internet service subscriptions iand make its network available to third party operators. “Valoo has laid the foundation for automation in the broadband access network, which is essential for operators looking to innovate with advanced digital broadband offerings while keeping their operational expenditure under control,” said Sandy Motley, Nokia’s president of fixed networks, “[and it has done it] with our Altiplano controller.”

Nokia’s Altiplano Access Controller is a suite of network management and software defined networking control functions. Together they automatically coax the best performance out of  broadband networks by constantly fine tuning them. Altiplano automates network lifecycle management activities and provides operators a single view of the entire access network domain. It has an open modular design based on the requirements of cloud computing, which means catering for micro-services controlled via open application programming interfaces. Ultimately these let operators integrate everything more easily, across all the various sub-systems such as OSS/BSS, IT and cloud platforms. It all means that each operator’s own applications can be applied more easily.

Nokia 7360-FX Lightspan series access node (OLT) is used for industrial scale fibre rollouts. Usually located in telecom central office, it connects thousands of users via optical fibre, aggregates their broadband traffic and sends it deeper in the network. The fibre access node supports every fibre technology available, including GPON, XGS-PON, 25GS-PON and Point-to-Point Ethernet, so that all eventualities are catered for.

Nokia Lightspan MF-2 is the industry’s first family of software-defined fiber access nodes designed to provide non-blocking delivery of massive scale, high-speed broadband services with 25G PON, 50G PON and beyond. 

Nokia’s Quillion chipset: is this why the Finns have the world’s best information diet?

Thales’ geostationary satellite powers Project Vertigo to giddy heights

Nick Booth
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Thales’ geostationary satellite powers Project Vertigo to giddy heights

97W optics smash speed record

The Thales laboratory in Palaiseau, France (pictured) has made history for creating a high-power optical data transmission system that ran the EU Vertigo (Very High Throughput Satellite-Ground Optical link) project at 25 Gbps. Engineers from Thales Alenia Space, Thales, G&H and Leo Space Photonics R&D showed that the generation and transmission of optical comms signals can speed data at 25 Gbps in a controlled environment at a record-breaking optical power of 97W which puts 100W-class transmissions within reach. This latest breakthrough s vital as it proves that both high power, longevity and high integrity are all simultaneously achievable.

This was all achieved by splitting a modulated optical signal into two paths, each amplified through an individual state-of-the-art G&H high power amplifier, then coherently combining the two amplifier outputs. The participants grabbed the chance to show how high and very high optical power generation works and prove to doubters that it is possible to transmit telecom signals at very high power while maintaining data integrity. Both high power and data integrity are compulsory conditions before free-space optical links cab be contemplated over long distances.

Previously, in summer of 2022, outdoor trials of free-space optical links achieved a record transmission at 1 Tbps over an atmospheric optical path of 53 km. However, the new lab test campaign performed in Thales facilities gives the Vertigo project a new record on a different set of parameters, since it proves that future geostationary communication satellites using optical feeder links are feasible.

Following on from this latest development in the Vertigo project, the next step will be to target a full-scale coherent laser link between a geostationary satellite at an altitude around 36.000 km and a ground station. Vertigo is an H2020 collaborative project funded by the EU, launched on June 1st 2019 and completed at the beginning of 2023. The project consortium was composed of Creonic, ETH Zürich, Fraunhofer HHI, G&H, Leo Space Photonics R&D, ONERA, Thales Alenia Space in France and Switzerland and Thales Research & Technology.

Thales Alenia Space claims to have 40 years of experience to complement skills, expertise and cultures in telecoms. It sells its  navigation, Earth observation, environmental management, exploration, science and orbital infrastructures to governments and private industry. It design satellite-based systems that provide anytime, anywhere connections and positioning, monitor our planet, enhance management of its resources, and explore our Solar System and beyond. A joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), Thales Alenia Space is currently working with Telespazio to form the parent companies’ Space Alliance, which offers a complete range of services. Thales Alenia Space posted consolidated revenues of approximately €2.2 billion in 2022 and has around 8,500 employees in 10 countries with 17 sites in Europe and a plant in the US.

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