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Tele2, Telia and Elisa win spectrum in Estonian auction

Nick Booth
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Tele2, Telia and Elisa win spectrum in Estonian auction

Each telco gets two slices of 5Mhz for around €2m

The three competitive tenders for running Estonia’s 5G services have all been won by domestic service providers, according to local media agency ERR News. The Estonian divisions of Finland’s Elisa and of Sweden’s Tele2 and Telia, each triumphed in one of three competitive tenders for licenses to broaden bandwidth and network slice within the frequency band 694-790 MHz.

Each company won two 5 MHz frequency licenses, according Estonia’s regulator the Consumer Protection and Technical Supervision Agency (TTJA), which organized the tenders.

Elisa Esti’s winning bid was for €2,111,596, Telia Esti will pay €2,011,487 and Tele2 Estonia must pay €2 million euros exactly. The reserve price for a single license was a million euros, and the auction started on November 8, lasting for three rounds. The TTJA will issue the licenses after confirming the results of the competitive process and receiving the license fee and state fee.

There is something of a mountain to climb in terms of logistic and coverage. Each owner of a frequency license must make the communication service available to at least half of the territory  in each Estonian county within two years of issuing. After four years the coverage must be 95% per county, with the exception of namely Ida-Viru, Jõgeva, Tartu, Põlva and Võru. The latter are excepted because of their proximity to the Russian border, where restrictions on the broadcasting of TV channels based in the Russian Federation make service level guarantees more tricky. However, network construction can still go ahead and 5G can also be provided via other frequency bands in those counties.

Telia, Tele2 and Elisa were also winning bidders in the multi-million-euro first round 5G frequency auctions which began in April and ran over the summer. Lithuania-based telecoms and media firm Bite Group also entered the tender process. The fourth applicant was something of a wild card, Bite Group’s activities in Estonia having been previously concentrated on its TV channel TV3 and streaming platform Go3. In the end  it was not successful and didn’t offer extra competition to the country’s telecoms sector.

In Estonia the process of 5G building began in 2019 with the public tender for three concessions in the 3410 Mhz to 3800 Mhz range buut this was postponed for a year. Since then 5G has started to gradually replace 4G, which has been in existence for over a decade. It’s 3G infrastructure, which entered in service over 20 years ago has not been switched off yet.

Motorola to provide national network for Senegal’s emergency services

Annie Turner
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Motorola to provide national network for Senegal’s emergency services

The ASTRO P25 radio system will span more than 100 sites in Senegal

Motorola Solutions won a contract to deploy a nationwide ASTRO P25 radio network to modernise public safety communications in Senegal. The contract was awarded by the Government of Senegal, through its Ministry of the Interior.

This network will streamline communication between Senegal’s police, fire, ambulance and other emergency services and is intended to reduce emergency response times.



“Our investment in this state-of-the-art communications network will help to improve citizens’ safety,” said Antoine Felix Abdoulayer Diome, Minister of the Interior in Senegal.

Inter-agency improvements

The ASTRO P25 radio system will span more than 100 sites in Senegal. Motorola Solutions will also provide 24/7 technical support and maintenance.


“The ASTRO P25 network will enable Senegal’s emergency services to work more closely together, ensuring each agency has greater visibility of broader operations to enhance public safety,” said Patrick Fitting, head of sales Middle East, Africa and Central Asia at Motorola Solutions.

“The new network will also bring significant economic benefits to the country via extensive sub-contracts and employment opportunities for Senegalese companies to support the system’s installation and ongoing maintenance.”

Lessons from the UK?

In October, after a year-long enquiry, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found Motorola has charged the Home Office “well above competitive levels” for running the Airwave network for the emergency services.

It claims that Motorola is making £160 million excess profits as the Home Office and emergency services appear to be locked in with monopoly provider.

Ericsson and e& leave COP27 heading to Net Zero

Nick Booth
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Ericsson and e& leave COP27 heading to Net Zero

Signed an MOU in Egypt and keeping on

The Etisalat Group (e&) and Ericsson have vowed to cut their calorie consumption and building sleeker networks that will sustain a longer healthier future. They cemented this pact by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the 27th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27) in Egypt. The three-year partnership aims to support the Net Zero strategies of both the telco and the equipment maker while exploring opportunities to cut carbon emissions and energy consumption. The companies will jointly host a series of knowledge-sharing sessions, sharing Ericsson’s global expertise in energy-efficient strategies, such as its Breaking the Energy Curve initiative.

Etisalat said it will use Ericsson’s sustainable products and services, while Ericsson’s Take-Back programme will help it recycle more responsibly and find new ways to collaborate over e-waste across the group’s network. The partnership is part of e&’s metamorphic business plans to turn Net Zero and underlines the importance of improving network energy performance, according to Sabri Ali Albreiki, Chief Technology Officer, e& international.

“We aim to accelerate the decarbonisation [with Ericsson’s] latest generation of energy efficient radio equipment and software features,” said Albreiki, “this agreement is part of e&’s broader commitment to reduce waste and achieve a sustainable low-carbon society.”  

The Etisalat Group is the first UAE private sector member of the UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators as part of the group’s participation at COP27. Being among other sustainable-focused thought-leaders reinforces e&’s strategic position as a driving force of the UAE’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050, it said.

Watch out for the sustainable 5G solutions, said Ekow Nelson, Vice President and Head of Global Customer Unit for e& at Ericsson Middle East and Africa. “Our intelligent RAN energy-saving software features, will reduce e&’s environmental footprint and manage the expected growth in data traffic using as little energy as possible,” said Nelson.

Vodafone UK only bright spot as Germany puts in dull H1 performance

Annie Turner
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Vodafone UK only bright spot as Germany puts in dull H1 performance

Group adjusted earnings down €2.6 billion for first half of financial year

Vodafone’s H1 results don’t make inspiring reading. The group’s profits fell in the first half of its financial year to the end of September, dragged down by Germany which accounts for 30% of the group’s revenue.

Vodafone’s revenues were up by a modest 2% to €22.9 billion but adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBIDTA) were down 2.5% to €7.2 billion, below market expectations of €7.5 billion. 

The UK was a bright spot, where revenues grew by 7% to €3.4 billion and an EBITDA of €685 million. Vodafone is negotiations to acquire the UK’s smallest operator, Three UK.

Germany down

However, Germany, Italy and Spain put in disappointing performances, leading the group to lower its outlook for the full year as profits dropped in H1.

Germany’s adjusted EBIDTA fell 7.4% to €2.68 billion, apparently due in part to losing broadband customers and higher customer acquisition costs. Vodafone recently announced a joint venture in Germany with Altice to reach 7 million homes in six years.

Vodafone acquired Liberty Global’s cable assets in Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic and Romania in a controversial deal in 2019 for €18.4 billion.

Group CEO Nick Read said in a statement, “Our recently announced fibre-to-the-home JV in Germany will further enhance our leading gigabit fixed network position in Europe’s largest market”.

Vodafone’s performance in Italy and Spain were worse quarter-on-quarter, attributed to fierce price competition. Earlier this year, Read reportedly turned down an offer from Iliad Group to buy its Italian opco for more than €11 billion.

Worth noting that the French group Iliad this week https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/french-telecom-group-iliads-q3-revenue-rises-8-2022-11-15/reported an 8% jump in like-for-like sales for the third quarter after subscriber numbers grew in France, Italy and Poland.

Lowered expectations

The group lowered its earnings guidance to between €15 billion and €15.2 billion, down from €15 billion to €15.5 billion, and revised its expected free cash flow from €5.3 billion to €5.1 billion.

“In the context of a challenging macroeconomic environment, we are delivering a resilient performance this year,” Vodafone’s Group CEO, Nick Read, said in a statement.

Vodafone will also enjoy a boost to the balance sheet because last week, after months of speculation, the group finally sealed a deal to sell off a majority stake in its Vantage Towers business.

Read noted, “We are pleased the Vantage Towers transaction accomplished our three key objectives – monetisation, deconsolidation and retaining co-control of these strategically important assets – and we continue to deliver portfolio actions to strengthen our businesses and accelerate growth.

The group set a new target to shave more than €1 billion off operating costs by 2026 by “streamlining and further simplifying the group,” Read said. “We are taking a number of steps to mitigate the economic backdrop of high energy costs and rising inflation.

“These include taking pricing action across Europe, whilst at the same time supporting our most vulnerable customers and driving energy efficiency measures across the business.

Telecom Italia must be nationalised not rationalised – Urso

Nick Booth
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Telecom Italia must be nationalised not rationalised – Urso

Forza Digitaliano!

The new Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni wants to bring Telecom Italia’s (TIM) network under state control to expedite a digitalised economy, Reuters has reported. The nation’s Industry Minister Adolfo Urso has said the privatisation of Italy’s former phone monopoly in 1997 was a “mistake” and that “we need the network to be under public control,” Urso told a business conference in Rome.

Urso’s remarks came as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration reviewed options on how to combine TIM‘s landline grid with that of smaller rival Open Fiber to create a single national broadband network. One possibility is the so-called ‘Minerva’ project, which would involve a takeover bid for TIM by state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), which controls Open Fiber.

TIM’s alternative plans, drawn up by structural engineer turned CEO Pietro Labriola, is to spin-off the intelligent parts of the infrastructure (the network but not the towers) and later merge with Open Fiber. This has been litigated for within a memorandum of understanding with CDP.

“The government strategy is to have a state-controlled network”, and it will decide “with one voice” how to reach this goal, Urso said at the Rome conference.

Last week, Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti urged caution on the Minerva plan, saying it was something that needed to be extensively discussed within the government.

Zenoh attacks the sheer waste and futility of telco clouds

Nick Booth
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Zenoh attacks the sheer waste and futility of telco clouds

Wasteful machine to machine chats need to stop

The pioneer of energy saving data comms protocol Zenoh has called on mobile network operators to save millions on their comms bills and cut their carbon consumption, through a simple system they could adopt now. The telco cloud’s inherent problem is that machines are too chatty and this bad habit is a galloping expense that needs to be nipped in the bud, according to ZettaScale CEO Angelo Corsaro.

Telco clouds are great for saving time on development but they could make telcos repent at leisure when they find they have long term running cost problems. This is because telco clouds are set up to make billions of pointless, multi-national, party-line line conversations every minute – and these expensive power consuming computing transactions and long-distance communications could all be avoided. ZettaScale, creator of Zenoh, aims to give telcos the option of saving a fortune on both comms and calories by making telco clouds run more efficiently.

Machine to machine conversations in a domestic Internet of Things service exemplify how wasteful the telco cloud can be, said Corsaro. A connected electricity meter that communicates through a cloud service will talk to its owner via hundreds of thousand of miles of cloud, even though they are yards apart. The communications protocols of cloud-to-microcontroller applications are incredibly flabby and Zetta’s design would eliminate 90% of the baggage by using one set of data formats for motion, rest and processing.

Best of all, Zenoh shuns the wastefulness of other protocols like DDS (data distribution service) MQTT (message queuing telemetry transport) and NDN (name data networking), which need to involve several sets of machines to be involved, whereas Zenoh could enable your phone to talk directly to your electricity meter, without getting involving servers all over the globe.

This makes a massive saving processing power. The cost of online communications was famously exemplified by the song, Despacito which had five billion views on YouTube, and these views burned as much energy as 40,000 US homes use in a year because “every search, click, or streamed video activates servers in six to eight data centres around the world,” according to Power Engineering magazine.

Currently each byte sent between your phone and your electricity meter must journey across many switches, routers and fibres and that wastes energy, according to ZettaScale CEO Angelo Corsaro. If the conversation was direct, all the energy consumption would be avoided. “Why on earth are we doing this?” said Corsaro, “it’s all because protocols like MQTT only support client to broker communication, and the broker sits in the cloud. So the only way to communicate is to make this incredible detour. There are thousands of these pointless detours every day.”

Zenoh solves this class of problems by allowing devices that happen to be close-by to communicate directly, and ensuring that communication is kept as localised as possible – based on the location of the entities that are trying to exchange data. Zenoh’s wire efficiency also helps in achieving incredible performance, thus allowing applications to leverage the full bandwidth of the underlying network. Zenoh started as an internal research project funded by a consortium of partners of developer ZettaScale. It has decided to open source Zenoh through the Eclipse Open Source Foundation, as a guarantee of transparency, governance and availability to its community. Zenoh was officially accepted as an open source community Eclipse project on March 5, 2020.

In spite of its youth, Zenoh’s adoption is proliferating, not because of some mega-vendor’s marketing muscle, but through organic adoption by engineers, as this blog explains.

Botswana’s Connected Ambulance is heartwarming 5G debut for Orange Africa

Nick Booth
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Botswana’s Connected Ambulance is heartwarming 5G debut for Orange Africa

Gives 30% of Botswanans health, education, security

The Orange Group has launched its first ever 5G service in Africa with a dramatic social impact in Botswana. With the switching of a service for the Gaborone and Francistown, it has unveiled a number of social service applications designed to use 5G. The best impression could be created by a Connected Ambulance project to save lives by empowering paramedics to make critical interventions en route to hospitals.

Orange Botswana’ s 5G service in greater Gaborone and Francistown will cover 30% of the national population. Other cities will follow in early 2023. It is the services that will catch time imagination of the public. Orange Botswana is looking forward to collaborating with government and enterprises to implement 5G-based use cases. In November it opened an Orange Digital Centre to help bridge the digital divide and prepare Batswana youth for employment in a blossoming digital ecosystem.

The Connected Ambulance is possibly the service that will have the most impact and show locals how 5G could make practical improvements to their lives. The number of patients who die in ambulances through child birth complications, wounds and fever could be dramatically reduced by the telco’s telemedical support. The system was developed in partnership with MRI Botswana and is one of a number of social services Orange has prioritised as it brings its first ever 5G service to the African continent.

The telco has been frustrated by long waits for 5G spectrum licenses to be allocated, developing applications while it waited, according to Jerôme Henique, CEO for Orange Middle East and Africa. However, the wait is over and the digital transformation of Africa starts now, in Botswana, said Henique.

On the domestic front, Orange Botswana has introduced new 5G fixed broadband services and mobile data bundles. The offers are available for residential customers, small and medium enterprises and include value added services. The fixed offers are available from 15Mbps for Prepaid and from 20Mbps for Postpaid with a monthly rental from BWP 699 (€53 per month). The subscription of Prepaid offers is accessible through Orange Yame App, USSD and Card to Wallet. “5G will change how customers experience connectivity,” said Nene Maiga, CEO of Orange Botswana. The ultra-high speed and low latency conditions will support more e-health, connected vehicles and alternative realities.

Orange has been frustrated by the slow pace of 5G license attribution in the Middle East and Africa said Jerôme Henique, Orange’s CEO for the region. Orange said it is collaborating with several regulatory bodies to help build a 5G rollout roadmap while testing the technology and developing use cases that fit with the local populations’ need. This launch will allow Orange to cut its teeth and scale-up this technology for other Orange countries across Africa, said Henique. “This will promote Africa’s digital inclusion, resulting in socio-economic growth and job creation. Digital Transformation for begins here and now, in Botswana,” said Henique.

Trouble for telcos: Cellnex revenues €2.57bn, up 46% but €17.1bn in debt

Annie Turner
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Trouble for telcos: Cellnex revenues €2.57bn, up 46% but €17.1bn in debt

Now growth fuelled by acquisitions, low interest rates is no longer viable, higher rents are inevitable

The European towerco, Cellnex, reported revenues of €2.57 billion for the first nine month of the year, up 46% compared with last year.

The growth is mostly due to acquisitions. Earlier this year it failed in its bid to acquire stakes in Deutsche Telekom’s tower estate in Germany and Austria, and last week lost out in its attempt to secure a holding in Vodafone’s Vantage Towers.

It is, though, on the final lap of acquiring of CK Hutchison’s European tower sites for €10 billion, having had to jump through some regulatory hurdles, and is close to securing the UK assets.

Overall, in the first nine months Cellnex has lost €255 million and its debts stand at €17.1 billion in the wake of its acquisition spree, fuelled by cheap money.

Infrastructure is a long-term play – a steady, predictable income over many year and Cellnex has close to 105,000 operational tower sites (see table) and plans to construct another 21,000 sites by 2030.

CountryTowers
Austria4,516
Denmark1,502
Ireland1,890
France24,015
Italy20,921
Netherlands4,075
Poland15,199
Portugal6,086
Spain24,015
Sweden2,791
Switzerland5,397
Distributed antenna system (DAS) nodes & small cells6,969
Source: Cellnex

Still the rapid growth of towercos and data centre firms has been fuelled by cheap money and, as the Financial Times points out [subscription required], share prices in Cellnex and other towercos, along with data centre owners have suffered sharp drops in their share price since June as markets fret about their huge debts and the rising cost of capital as interest rates rise.

Although Cellnex holds much of its debt at fixed interest rates, about €2 billion of its debt matures in 2024.

As we move out of the post-2008 crash era, into one of higher inflation and interest rates, it will be interesting to see how well towercos and data centre owners can adapt their business models to the different economic climate.

Higher rents are inevitable. Which telcos that impacts, how much and when is no doubt already the subject of detailed study.

EC says all EU members must show Huawei the highway

Nick Booth
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EC says all EU members must show Huawei the highway

No exceptions to the rules

The European Commission has urged all EU member countries to participate in the collective risk reduction involved in removing Chinese telecoms equipment from their 5G networks, according to a report in Competition Policy International. Germany in particular must adhere to the European Community’s joint decision over 5G security guidelines, it said. “We are urging member states who have not yet imposed restrictions on high-risk suppliers to do that without delay, as a matter of urgency,” said Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the Commission in charge of digital issues.

“A number of countries have passed legislation but they have not put it into effect. Making it work is even better,” said Vestager. Asked whether Germany, where operators like Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone have relied heavily on equipment from Chinese giant Huawei in the past decade, is of particular concern, the EVP answered diplomatically. “It is not only Germany, but it is also Germany,” said Vestager.

In 2020 European countries agreed on The 5G Security Toolbox a set of measures to reduce their reliance on “high-risk vendors” for future telecoms networks. It was widely seen as a policy to dial down procurement of equipment from Huawei and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE.

Last year the German government in Berlin passed a law allowing its ministries to intervene on telco contracts with Huawei. However, the law leaves a lot of discretion to the government over how it imposes restrictions. The new government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz was expected to take a tougher stance on China but so far hasn’t intervened much in telcos’ reliance on Huawei.

SoftSIM set to free the IoT in 2023

Nick Booth
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SoftSIM set to free the IoT in 2023

Promises to do what the cloud did for the Internet

Denmark-based comms vendor Onomondo says its new SoftSIM invention will do for the Internet of Things (IoT) what the cloud did for the Internet by totally disaggregating all the elements of connectivity. A global launch of the SoftSIM is planned for Q1 2023. The SoftSIM will take off because so-called eSIMs are not as liberating as they pretend to be, its makers say.

A product of Embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card standards, eSIMs have satisfied many Smartphone makers and IoT device makers by letting users load new carrier profiles digitally, over the air. But while eSIMS have eliminated the need to physically swap SIM cards, the user still needs a SIM card to be installed initially, but they don’t with a SoftSIM. Granted the eSIM created more flexibility than regular SIMs, but the commercial agreements can be equally binding through bootstrapped network profiles, and hardware still needs to be installed into each device. Just as a release from Alcatraz to an open prison might be comparatively nicer porridge, it is not full liberation. You may not be dong so much punishing hardware time, but you are still on probation to the device maker or telecoms operator.

Onomondo said the SoftSIM allows the user to work with any mobile network operator. It has redesigned existing IoT connectivity architecture through integrating more than 700 operators at the Radio Access Network (RAN) level across more than 180 countries, as well as layering its own API-based IoT platform on top. With the new SoftSIM, as soon as the SIM is downloaded, assets can seamlessly move across national borders without the inherent complexity of roaming.

Users get a full instant insight on the performance of each connected device, allowing them to tap into their global grid and troubleshoot IoT devices from anywhere.  Data is transferred directly across the Onomondo virtual network to one of the firm’s cloud partners (such as Microsoft Azure, AWS or IBM Watson), so enterprises can easily understand what is going on between devices and the network, through to the core network, and on to the IoT cloud from a single interface. 

The Onomondo ‘any operator’ ethos lets customers choose their network and the type of service they need for the product they are tracking. This means that customers don’t suffer from any hidden lock-ins or needless costs that can even arise from eSIM. Making the SIM downloadable also means that customers only pay to track their devices when they need to, rather than paying upfront for a SIM card and associated costs in connection to its installation. This is why the bill of materials for companies rolling out IoT can be cut by 50-90% depending on the scale of the fleet.  

There are huge carbon savings too. If everyone in the IoT industry stopped using SIM cards that would eradicating the need for billions of chips a year to be manufactured, transported and installed. A Trusted Connectivity Alliance report in 2021 estimated that SIM card production resulted in 560,000 tons of CO₂ emissions and 18,000 tons of plastic. Not to mention saving the rare minerals that are being mined by sale children in The Democratic Republic of Congo. SIM production is expected to proliferate dramatically as connected IoT devices are predicted to reach 27 billion by 2025. Onomondo’s SoftSIM can be downloaded directly from the cloud onto chipsets already found in devices.

“The move to a plug and play SIM card is the catalyst that IoT has needed to be deployed at scale and to start to reach its full potential,” said Onomondo CEO Michael Karlsen.

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