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Nigeria’s ImaliPay gets $3m to mobilise Africa’s gig economy

Nick Booth
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Nigeria’s ImaliPay gets $3m to mobilise Africa’s gig economy

One step schlep for bike taxi drivers to get business finance

African FinTech startup ImaliPay, has closed a seed funding round for $3 million to cater for the booming ‘gig economy’ in the continent. Founded in late 2020 in Nigeria, the company’s service is described by African Business Communities (ABC) as a pioneer for giving eRide-hailable drivers and gig workers unprecedented access to working capital. The lack of financial liquidity among gig workers has been identified as a constraint on business growth, since the lack of credit facilities stymies even the most basic business deals. According to ABC the banks have neglected huge swathes of the population and held back the development of economies across the continent. 

In transport industry terms the new service offers financial services as a ‘one-step-schlep’, a route to everything they need. The empowering system comprises a single channel, including an application programming interface (API) for gig workers and platforms, letting them power their gigs with services like buy now, pay later (BNPL), insurance and savings.

The African gig economy is likely to have over 80 million workers by 2030, said ABC. ImaliPay ran a pilot in Nigeria which found out that motorcycle taxi riders on Safeboda were interested in the services, even when they had existing accounts with several Nigerian banks. According to ABC’s sources, the ImaliPay platform has filled a gap and allowed for more gig workers to improve their finances.

“Our drive to start and keep ImaliPay soaring is firmly rooted in the impact we would like to make in fostering financial security in the gig economy, serving the underbanked and walking them through a tailored journey of financial inclusion,” said ImaliPay co-founder and CEO Tatenda Furusa. “Having strong partners and investors around the table is a show of good faith that we are building key services for the future of work.”

James Allum, Payoneer’s senior VP and regional head of Europe spoke of an exciting “ripple effect” at many local business events as it becomes apparent that digital firms are stepping to solve business problems and smooth out the kinks in the supply chain. Commerce tech providers can be “change agents” and shift the ways people get their funds and services, adding new efficiencies, said ABC.

Digitalbridge fires up fibre to the home race with £295m rocket behind Netomnia

Nick Booth
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Digitalbridge fires up fibre to the home race with £295m rocket behind Netomnia

Financiers bet on fibre runners in the last mile FTTH stakes

The UK’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network builder stakes just upped the pace dramatically as one of the dark horses Netomnia and its ISP partner YouFibre raised £295 million in a funding round led by DigitalBridge Investment Management, part of the DigitalBridge Group. Stable owners Soho Square Capital and Advencap also took part in the funding round, just five months after Netomnia and YouFibre raised £123 million in November 2021. 

Netomnia has been building fibre access networks in multiple towns and cities across the south of England, in cathedral and market towns such as Canterbury, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Guildford and Maidstone. Its fibre terminates at 130,000 premises and it aims to accelerate the rate of installation quite sharply reach 1 million premises by 2023. 

As is happening in Germany, financial institutions are seeing clear gain on investing in fibre and the City of London has funded many fibre broadband projects. According to Telecom TV, there are dozens of companies racing to get their fibre connections to Britain’s 30 million premises first. As each adopts its own network rollout technique a variety of business models are backing these efforts, according to analyst Ray le Maistre. 

As with the growth of cable TV, which was created by dozens of local TV channels, each with its own proprietary IT systems, there could be problems when consolidation happens. Virgin Media O2, which grew by acquisition at the expense of integration, has always struggled to connect its various silos and departments together. 

When small customer-service-driven players emerge to challenge the arrogance of the ‘talk to the call centre’ brands, consolidation is inevitable, if only to stop the small companies showing up the encumbents. DigitalBridge the funder of Netomnia, has been investing in all kinds of infrastructure. In March it announced it is to buy Belgian telco Telenet’s towers for €745 million. 

40 Ways to Play in the Metaverse: Amdocs & Openet eBook

Marcin Piechowski
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40 Ways to Play in the Metaverse: Amdocs & Openet eBook

Flex IT buys MKCL, Peak Technologies creates Net Zero enabling kit refurb plan

Nick Booth
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Flex IT buys MKCL, Peak Technologies creates Net Zero enabling kit refurb plan

Mobile supply chain Circular economy is deal breaker – report

A new trend is emerging in technology supply chains with the ‘circular economy’ increasingly likely to affect buying patterns, according to Gartner Research. April has seen two new developments in the new circular sector. Netherlands-based Flex lifecycle management specialist has acquired its German demo partner MKCL, while in the UK digital supply chain specialist Peak Technologies has launched a new scheme to boost refurbishment by simplifying the collection and management of mobile devices.  

Both initiatives aim to boost refurb rates by widening the reach and channels of distribution. In a statement, Peak Technologies said its aim is to help companies to meet their Net Zero targets and corporate social responsibility obligations by simplifying corporate recycling. 

According to Gartner Research the majority of supply chain professionals expect the emphasis on the circular economy to increase in the two years. However, many companies – in the UK  especially – struggle to find a timely and simple solution to their electronic waste problems.

The path of the circular economy does not run entirely smoothly in Europe either according to Netherlands-based Flex IT, one of the largest European specialists in IT lifecycle management. Flex-IT has offices in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Sweden, Bulgaria and the UK. Buying MKCL gives it access to a demo service company, which helps it get buy-in from end users and sales partners and gets the wheels of the circular economy moving faster, according to Leon Timmermans, CEO of Flex IT.

“With the acquisition of MKCL, Flex IT takes another big step forward in its position as a circular service provider for [mobile tech] vendors,” said Leon Timmermans, CEO of Flex IT, “Flex wants to support companies in this transition and the acquisition of MKCL helps to make this ambition a reality.”

MKCL has 20 years of knowledge of the logistics, production and trading of tech hardware, and the rare, niche skills needed for ‘demo pool management’ which are increasingly in demand in the re-furb industry. “The acquisition will help MKCL to grow to its full potential [because] Flex IT is one of the largest circular IT organisations in the world,” says MKCL CEO Michael Frautz. 

Meanwhile, UK-based mobile device distributor Peak Technologies, which specialises in digital supply chain, mobile workforce and retail handsets and gadgets, has evolved into the role of Net Zero enabler, according to UK MD Rene Schrama.

It started by providing maintenance contracts for the mobile computers, wireless networks and barcode printers it sold. Then it transpired that refurbishing old systems at its Chippenham facility tripled the gadget’s lifetime and cut carbon emissions by eliminating a lengthy trip to an Eastern European repair centre. Harvesting spare parts from obsolete machines and extracting metals and minerals expanded as a business activity, to the point where Peak processed tonnes of material in 2021. These activities had proved be too complicated and time consuming for clients to set up.

Peak Technologies has now set up a new incentive scheme to simplify the realisation of net Zero targets for tech companies. It gathers donated technology and organises for it to be wiped by a service company, Blancco, then arranges for it to be sold through The British Heart Foundation’s BHF ebay shop. Peak then commissions the planting of a tree through the HutGroup’s More Trees system. Peak Tech then does all the tricky sustainability accounting and certifies each customer on the amount of CO2 it has saved.

“At Peak Technologies, we have invested in our expertise to help our customers to enjoy the benefits of the circular economy,” said Schrama, “by partnering closely with our customers, we can together make a good contribution towards a more sustainable world.” 

Every telco’s power consumption could be slashed with crystals – Berkeley study

Nick Booth
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Every telco’s power consumption could be slashed with crystals – Berkeley study

Every transistor across entire network could process for less

A new power saving breakthrough in Silicon technology could dramatically cut the carbon consumption of telecoms networks. A study published in the journal Nature, describes a major energy saving breakthrough in the design of transistors, the tiny electrical switches that processors are made of. Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have found a way to cut their energy consumption ’significantly’ without sacrificing speed, size or performance. 

They have created a crystal lattice that coaxes a much better performance, for less energy, from the Gate Oxide, a key component for switching the transistor on and off. This efficiency improvement is created by a negative capacitance effect, which helps lower the voltage needed to store charge in a material.

The existence of negative capacitance was first discovered in 2008 and the effect first demonstrated in a ferroelectric crystal in 2011 by Sayeef Salahuddin, the TSMC Distinguished professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Since then there has been a long painstaking research for exactly the right crystal lattice structure to ‘catalyse’ the action of the transistors by lowering the energy they needed. 

“We have been able to show that our gate-oxide technology is better than commercially available transistors: What the trillion-dollar semiconductor industry can do today — we can essentially beat them,” said Salahuddin.

The new study shows how negative capacitance can be achieved in an engineered crystal composed of a layered stack of hafnium oxide and zirconium oxide, which is readily compatible with advanced silicon transistors. Careful manipulation of the ferroelectricity, the property exhibited by any material when it creates a spontaneous electrical field, was previously only achievable with perovskites, whose crystal structure is not compatible with silicon. But in the breakthrough study, a team from the University of California paired hafnium oxide and zirconium oxide into a superlattice, an engineered crystal structure, which could simultaneously create ferroelectricity and antiferroelectricity.

Every CPU, GPU or DPU in every piece of equipment across a telco’s network, in the data centre, the IOT and the Mobile Edge, could run on significantly less power, said Salahuddin. As would the phones, tablets and laptops of the consumers.

“In the last 10 years, the energy used for computing has increased exponentially, already accounting for single digit percentages of the world’s energy production, which grows only linearly, without an end in sight,” Salahuddin said. “Usually, when we are using our computers and our cell phones, we don’t think about how much energy we are using. But it is a huge amount, and it is only going to go up. Our goal is to reduce the energy needs of this basic building block of computing, because that brings down the energy needs for the entire system.”

There are more details, including how the researchers discovered the effects of a  superlattice structure composed of three atomic layers of zirconium oxide sandwiched between two single atomic layers of hafnium oxide, here.

Vodafone won’t pay £3 billion for low quality operator Talk Talk – analysts

Nick Booth
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Vodafone won’t pay £3 billion for low quality operator Talk Talk – analysts

When plotting a unsuitable merger, prepare to dig two graves

UK telco Vodafone could face an investor revolt if it bought the ‘low-quality’ operator Talk Talk, analysts from the investment banking and telecoms sectors have claimed.

After UK broadband provider Talk Talk asked investment bank Lazard to search for potential buyers and field approaches, rumours have circulated in the media that Vodafone is considering a merger. 

Talk Talk, once listed on the FTSE 250, was discredited after allowing the credit card details of its 4 million customers to be stolen. The mishandling of the crisis, and the revelation that the stolen data hadn’t even been encrypted, led to the resignation of CEO Dido Harding. 

In 2020 TalkTalk became the subject of a £1.1bn takeover by Toscafund, which valued the broadband provider at £1.8bn. The deal took the ISP private and gave it more options for future plans deals, such as taking a controlling interest of fibre to the premises (FTTP), backing the installer Freedom Fibre and buying Ethernet provider Virtual1.

According to reports, Talk Talk would want Vodafone, valued at £36billion, to find another £3billion to acquire it. “Rather optimistic for an ISP that doesn’t have any significant fixed line broadband infrastructure to call its own, excluding their old unbundled LLU network, and largely just piggy backs off OpenReach, City Fibre and Freedom Fibre,” said analyst Mark Jackson at ISP Review.

The verdict of Carl Murdock-Smith, telecoms analyst at investment bank Berenberg, was that any acquisition of Talk Talk would be received poorly by shareholders of the company buying it. “If Vodafone does go ahead with an acquisition, a lot of people would ask why they didn’t do this the last time Talk Talk was up for sale,” Murdock-Smith told the Mail on Sunday. 

“Investors are looking for Vodafone to either do disposals or mergers, not acquisitions of low-quality operators,” said Murdock-Smith.

Toscafund is run by Martin Hughes, who known as The Rottweiler in City of London circles because of his aggressive style when agitating for change at firms he invests in. Hughes became chairman in 2017 after Dido Harding had resigned. That management style might clash with activist investor Cevian Capital, which has a stake in Vodafone and has since been pushing for change in the way it is run.

21 Euro telcos cut wholesale roaming fees on Ukrainian mobile operators

Nick Booth
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21 Euro telcos cut wholesale roaming fees on Ukrainian mobile operators

Waiver helps Ruthanian refugees keep in contact with homeland

Twenty one european telcos have agreed to waive wholesale roaming charges for three months on Ukrainian telcos, to help Ruthenian refugees stay in touch with their families.

Wholesale roaming fees are paid by telecoms operators to their peers in another EU country. All participants have agreed to reduce wholesale roaming charges and termination rates – charged by telcos for completing outgoing calls on their networks – to cover their costs. They will also cut termination rates for calls from Ukrainian numbers. The size of the reduction is up to the companies, according to their bilateral agreements.

Luminaries such as Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and 20 others have taken initiatives, with a dozen already allowing free calls to Ukraine and waiving retail roaming fees in recent weeks.

The association of mobile virtual network operators, MVNO Europe, and all three of Ukraine’s mobile operators joined the new wholesale initiative.

European Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager called on other companies to do the same, claiming that phone calls “can make a real difference in these extraordinary circumstances”. EU lawmaker Angelika Winzig had steered the issue through the European Parliament.

Other companies which have pledge commitment include Bouygues, Fastweb, Iliad, KPN, Liberty Global, MasMovil, Polkomtel, Proximus, Telefonica, Telenor, Telia Company, Three Group and TIM.

Three UK says 5G handset usage quadrupled in 2021, its 5G traffic has grown 385% since 2020

Annie Turner
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Three UK says 5G handset usage quadrupled in 2021, its 5G traffic has grown 385% since 2020

The data is part of the operator’s new Mobile Britain report published today.

Three UK is predicting that 5G will account for 35% of data usage by the end of 2022, saving people 23 hours of download time every month.

The Mobile Britain report says data traffic on Three’s 5G network is up by 385% since 2020, overtaking 3G for the first time. 5G now carries about double the amount of data on the 3G network.

The report was published in the same week as data traffic on Three’s network reached an all-time high of 1Tbps, apparently propelled by large audiences watching Champions’ League footballs matches.

Using Netflix’s recommended bitrate for full HD (1080) and 4K, 1Tbps is equivalent to 66,667 concurrent 4K streams or 200,000 concurrent full HD streams.

Three UK’s new report reckons that 2022 will be the year of the phone call as 39% of respondents to its survey said they prefer to call rather than text. Almost a third of respondents (30% said they make more phone calls now than in pre-pandemic days.

During the first lockdown, the volume of phone calls reached record highs and during 2020, were on average 16% longer as people stayed in touch those who matter to them.

The trend continued un 2021 when number of calls and the total number of minutes spent on calls increased. Some 13 million Brits say they feel more comfortable talking on the phone and 53% of adults attach more importance to them.

There are changes in other habits too. Almost third of people (30%) say they are more like to watch a TV or film on a Sunday than they were five years ago, with 50% saying they are streaming a boxset or film rather than watching live or a DVD.

In the past six months, Sunday streaming was responsible for two of the largest monthly peaks as well as almost a quarter of last year’s weekly peaks. This pattern looks set to continue; so far in 2022, Sundays have been the days with the highest peak usage for four out of eight weeks.

Carlo Melis, Chief Network Officer at ThreeUK,commented, “To keep up with the demand for data, we are investing more than £2 billion in transforming our network and IT infrastructure, with 5G now live in over 370 locations covering half of the UK population.” 

Read the full report here.

US offers $3m prize if you can get 5G to open up

Nick Booth
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US offers $3m prize if you can get 5G to open up

Department of Defence wants secure but Open RANs

The US Department of Defence (DoD) has announced a collaboration with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) and the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) in search of non-proprietary 5G systems. There are cash rewards on offer for European inventors who can solve problems for business, society and the telecoms industry with 5G.

European developers can apply to take part in the $3 million challenge but the terms stipulate that they must be from nations aligned to US standards of privacy and security. 

Speaking at the launch of the 5G Challenge Preliminary Event: RAN Subsystem Interoperability, Amanda Toman, Acting Principal Director of 5G-Future G explained the rationale. The aim of the competition is to expedite the development and adoption of open interfaces, interoperable components and joint contributions from multi-vendors towards an open 5G ecosystem.

“The Department is committed to supporting innovation efforts that accelerate the domestic development of 5G and Future G technologies,” said Toman, “5G is too critical a technology sector to relinquish to countries whose products and technologies are not aligned with our standards of privacy and security.”

It’s bad enough that the legacy of vendor-specific closed-source software and hardware is higher costs, stifled invention and crushed competition, according to the DoD. What’s really disturbing is that proprietary systems often make security issues difficult to detect and resolve. 

The 5G Challenge aims to foster a large, vibrant and diverse vendor community dedicated to advancing 5G interoperability towards ‘true plug-and-play operation’, unleashing a new era of technological innovation based on this critical technology, said the DoD statement.

The 5G Challenge will award up to $3 million to participants who submit hardware and/or software solutions for any or all of the following 5G network subsystems, which must be compliant with the 3GPP Release 15 Standard and O-RAN Alliance Specifications for Distributed Units (DU), Central Units (CU) and Radio Units (RU). The interoperability prize is only open for applications until May 5, 2022. 

Open RAN is a great idea, if only to save a lot on capital expenditure, said Danielle Royston, founder of telco could specialist TelcoDR, who sees it as potentially a ‘big threat’ to the trinity of Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia (HEN). “Everyone is testing it and experimenting,” said Royston, “but I do think it needs time and it will get better and stronger very quickly.”

Open source collaborators give the big telcos a supply chain to frighten the HENS with, forcing them to drop prices to keep their business, said Royston. That is one solution that would be welcome. “Either the telco gets the kit they want at a much lower price or, if the Open Ran actually works, they can switch and it’s cheaper,” said Royston, “either way the telcos win.”

Orange Spain to be senior partner after MásMóvil merger says CEO

Nick Booth
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Orange Spain to be senior partner after MásMóvil merger says CEO

Who will reign in Spain? Vodafone says it’s not plain

Orange Spain has confirmed its intention to be the major partner in the future merger with MásMóvil, Spanish newspaper Cinco Dias has reported.

The Orange Group subsidiary intends to acquire the majority of the shares of the joint venture at a later date, according to CEO Jean-Francoise Fallacher. The merger with MásMóvil is currently under negotiation but the agreement signed in early March between Orange and Lorca JVCO, the parent company of MásMóvil controlled by Cinven, KKR and Providence, stipulates equal voting rights in the resulting combined entity. However, the agreement includes the right to launch a Public Offer for Sale (OPV) under certain conditions agreed by both parties, as well as the right of Orange to take control and consolidate the resulting combined entity in the event of this IPO.

The message from Orange’s Spanish CEO is that it intends to be the industrial partner of the new group, valued at €19,600 million, making it the Spanish market leader in mobile lines and fixed broadband. Spain is the Orange Group’s second largest income contributor after France.

Speaking at an event organized by El Español, Fallacher said Orange is not leaving a market where it is the second largest operator and wants to be the main player. Negotiations between both parties are continuing, Fallacher said, hinting that the next stage of their coming together could be formally signed off in summer, as was the original plan when the two parties signed their first pact. The closing of the operation, once the permits are granted by competition authorities, including the European Commission, would take place in the second quarter of 2023.

Meanwhile, Vodafone Spain’s CEO Colman Deegan has welcomed the move, telling Cinco Dias that previous periods of consolidation had been positive for the domestic mobile telephony market.

The merger of two rivals will represent a big opportunity for Vodafone Spain because, Deegan observed, in many European markets the third operator is “the one that grows the most” and presents better returns on investment. History also tells us that previous periods of consolidation have been positive for the Spanish mobile telephony market, Deegan said.

Deegan disclosed that Vodafone has a goal to ensure that at least 20 per cent, but ideally 30 per cent, of its network comprises Open RAN components.

Vodafone Spain opened a 5G lab in December 2021 and in the new year it promised to provide 5G coverage via the 700 MHz frequency in 109 municipalities in 30 provinces during the course of the year. The telco secured 2×10 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band in July. Vodafone initially launched 5G services in Spain via hybrid 4G/LTE systems in 2019, the later used Amdocs to rationalise them. It launched a pre-commercial 5G SA network in June 2021.

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