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Vodafone, Accenture offer UK SMEs “enterprise-grade” cybersecurity services

The operator adds to its portfolio of security products with the launch of new Managed Security Services with Accenture.

Vodafone UK and Accenture have launched Vodafone Managed Security Services to help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) detect, react to and recover from cyber-attacks.

Vodafone Group and Accenture announced a strategic relationship last year.
 
SMEs often lack the experience, time or resources to stay ahead of the rapidly evolving threat of cyber-attacks, and their difficulties have been exacerbated by so many people working from home during lockdowns.
 
The new cybersecurity services include:
* Cyber Exposure Diagnostic (CED) to help businesses understand how well they’d fare against a cyber threat and identify where breaches are most likely to happen
* Penetration Testing/Vulnerability Assessment to protect businesses by carrying out simulated attacks to identify vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure
* Phishing Awareness helping businesses educate employees and turn them into an additional line of defence.
 
Breach Response, Forensic Services, Managed Detection and Response and Managed Firewall will follow shortly.

UK customers will also benefit from round-the-clock access to Vodafone and Accenture’s team of analysts and cyber specialists.
 
More than 65,000 hacking attempts are made each day in the UK, and at one small business is successfully attacked every 19 seconds according to insurance firm Hiscox.

Research by Vodafone found that a successful cyber-attack has an average cost more than £3,000 for small businesses, with 23% of SMEs indicating they would not survive such a loss.

Year’s Free Broadband for small firms

To continue to support small businesses as the UK eases out of lockdown, Vodafone relaunches its one year (12 months) free broadband offer for small businesses  on 7th May.

The offer, which was well received by small businesses when launched earlier this year, is available on a 36-month contract and is available to new small business customers with up to 50 employees and established one ready for an upgrade.
 
After the initial 12-months, the monthly fee reverts to the standard rate of £20.83 (+20% VAT) a month for Business Broadband Superfast 1 and £25 (+20% VAT) a month for Business Broadband Superfast 2.

There will be a one-off fee of £20 (+20% VAT) to cover set up costs, with no further payment required until the thirteenth month. The offer is available until 1 June 2021.
 
 

Belgium’s Council of Ministers launches national high-speed coverage plan

Telecom Minister Petra De Sutter said about 138,000 households are still unable to access high speed broadband.

Belgium’s Federal Council of Ministers has launched a national plan for fixed and mobile broadband to bring high-speed connections to all premises in the country and eliminate what it calls white-zone.

The Council said the issue must be addressed if Belgium is to achieve the European Union (EU) target of all homes having access to download speeds of 100Mbps by 2025 and 1Gbps by 2030.

Green and inclusive

The plan, Achieving digital transformation, is also part of the country’s green transition.

Minister De Sutter stressed that no-one should be left behind,However, we must ensure that no one is left behind. She said, “Every month, mayors from remote municipalities or parliamentarians ask me questions about this, and rightly so, because each of us has the right to access a quality internet. This is all the more true as in the future teleworking and remote learning will be increasingly common.”

Under the plan, every white zone – about 2% of territory – will be mapped and a government unit set up with responsibility for implementing the plan and monitoring its progress, along with  a Broadband Competence Office to deal with all issues relating to 5G and implementation of the EU Connectivity Toolbox.

The government will determine an exact budget for the plan at a later date.

Blue Planet picked as Vodafone’s transport domain orchestrator

The operator says the transport domain orchestrator (TDO) is an important step in Vodafone’s evolving network strategy.

Vodafone UK’s converged core network is Redstream brings together the fixed and mobile converged network, plus voice and data networks and solutions on one platform.

Ultimately it will be SDN-enabled so the network is automated, programmable and scalable on-demand, in a capital efficient way, making it sufficiently flexible and secure to introduce new services like network slicing.

Enter orchestrator

Blue Planet is part of Ciena, and its software is vendor- and technology-agnostic, and can communicate with the underlying IP and optical transmission components of the transport network. This means it can support both traditional and consumption-based connectivity services.

In a statement, Vodafone said the software will enable it to automate multiple processes and services for enterprise customers and developers. Telecoms networks are complex, and the TDO’s job is to ensure that business customers and developers can embed connectivity and new APIs into end-user services and platforms, without an in-depth understanding of how the telco’s networks and services are built and managed.
 
The TDO allows Vodafone to create an automated network platform with the Blue Planet software helping to automate the provision and activation of on-demand connectivity services across Vodafone UK’s multi-layer transport network. 

The intention is to reduce complexity, and increase operational and business agility, such as setting up a 5G network slice at the click of a button or integrating new APIs. From the enterprise side, customers could directly leverage capabilities to scale bandwidth on-demand.

First steps

The TDO is the first step towards this end-to-end automation, allowing Vodafone to exploit new innovative use cases which are not possible relying on manual intervention.
 
Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone UK, commented, “The Redstream Evolution project is a critical element of our long-term strategy to offer simplified connectivity services. The digital economy of tomorrow will partly be defined by how accessible we make connectivity, with a simplified service layer platform sitting in front of the complex telecommunications network.
 
“By integrating the Blue Planet TDO…We will also be able to introduce new flexible pricing models. With a platform layer on top of the network, new ideas do not have to be built from the foundations of the network up, potentially opening the door for new innovators and collaborators.
 
“The big picture strategy is to make connectivity more accessible to more people, but this vision does not work without a network that is flexible, adaptable and standardised, as well as edge-based and SDN-enabled.”
 
Rick Hamilton, Senior Vice President of Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, said, “Implementing a Network-as-a-Platform approach enables Vodafone UK to fast-track its infrastructure for more 5G opportunities.”
 
The Redstream network is fully converged and the current phase is to enable Vodafone to offer more services toward the edge of the network to gain  low latency.

Turkcell reaps the rewards of being a digital telco

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Group revenues at the operator jumped by 17.5% year-on-year in Q1 to TRY7.827 billion (€783.57 million).

This was mainly driven by rise in revenues from Turkcell Turkey’s data and digital services, plus growth in its subscriber base and increased equipment revenues, supported by digital sales channels.

The recent GSMA Intelligence Report, Global Mobile Trends 2021, stated: “Turkcell is a standout exception; it has re-engineered itself into a digital telco. Its overall performance now almost directly tracks its success in digital services”.

Group earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation increased by 17.7% year on year to €3.306 billion in the first three months of the year, while operating profit (EBIT) rose 14.9% to €165 million. Quarterly net profit improved by 26.6% y-o-y to €111 million mainly due to solid operational performance and disciplined financial risk management.

Turkcell highlighted its Q1 performance in strategic areas like standalone digital services revenues increasing 27.5% and digital business services revenues by 27.3%.

Turkcell’s subscriber base in Turkey grew by 705,000 quarterly net additions, the highest rise in three years,  including 410,000 mobile post-paid, 190,000 pre-paid and 50,000 fibre broadband additions.

Mobile average revenue per user (ARPU) grew 8.7% year on year and fixed residential ARPU by 11.0%. Digital channels accounted for 15.7% of mobile sales to Turkcell’s Turkish consumers, up 8.5% on the same period last year.

KPN rejected two unrelated, unsolicited takeover offers

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The Boards of KPN concluded that both approaches fail to provide tangible and material added value over KPN’s new growth strategy.

Royal KPN NV (KPN) confirms that it has recently rejected an unsolicited high level approach by EQT/Stonepeak for a takeover of KPN. The EQT/Stonepeak proposition did not include an offer price.

KPN also recently rejected a separate unsolicited approach for a takeover of KPN made by KKR.

Reviewed, rejected

In an announcement on its website, KPN said that in line with their fiduciary duties the Board of Management and the Supervisory Board of KPN (the Boards), supported by their financial and legal advisors, reviewed both approaches.

In particular, KPN says the Boards carefully considered whether the two approaches were in the best interest of KPN compared with KPN’s successful existing strategy for sustainable success and long-term value creation of the business, taking into account the interests of its shareholders and all its stakeholders, including customers, employees, creditors and bondholders, suppliers, business partners, government and Dutch society at large.

The Boards concluded to reject both unsolicited approaches as they did not provide tangible and material added value to KPN’s widely supported new strategy.

There have been and are no discussions or negotiations with EQT/Stonepeak or KKR.

Stick to the strategy

KPN said it is fully focused on the execution of its recently updated strategy ‘Accelerate to grow’ to create long-term value in the interests of all KPN stakeholders.

UPDATE: A Reuters report suggests EQT has not abandoned the idea, despite the rejection, and indeed has long had KPN in its sights.

 

Colt seals 10-year deal with Accedian

The plan is to provide the operator’s enterprise customers with better visibility and assurance.

Colt Technology Services announced a 10-year strategic partnership, under which Accedian will deliver dynamic connectivity solutions to the operator’s enterprise customers.

Accedian Skylight will provide analytics and a performance foundation for the service architecture of Colt’s IQ Network. The Colt IQ Network offers smart data centre and enterprise connectivity solutions designed to deliver application performance, availability and return on investment.

The Accedian and Colt partnership intends to improve end-to-end customer service quality and visibility through:
 •    Self-services portals for real-time visibility into network and application performance, including actionable insights for more informed business decisions
 •    machine-learning and other AI capabilities within Skylight provide performance analytics to a new depth of understanding around end user experience and how services are operating
 •    tailored dashboards and reporting capabilities can be configured by end users to provide key metrics and data to fulfil individual customer needs.

“Colt’s vision is to become the most customer-oriented business in our industry,” said Robin Farnan, Executive Vice President of Operations and Engineering at Colt. “This partnership marks the continuation of a journey which will deliver exceptional customer performance monitoring and the ability to augment Colt’s operational systems with real-time performance data. Equally important is the capability to offer bespoke customer insights, supporting our customers in their own digital evolution.”

Dion Joannou, Chief Executive Officer at Accedian, said, “We are extremely proud that our very long-standing partner, Colt, has entrusted the quality and performance of the Colt IQ Network to Accedian Skylight.”

Vodafone teams up with Google Cloud for global data platform

They say the platform will support new digital products and services for customers, as well its distributed systems.

The platform, Nucleus, will house a new system, Dynamo, to “drive data throughout Vodafone to enable it to more quickly offer its customers new, personalised products and services across multiple markets.
 
“Dynamo will allow Vodafone to tailor new connectivity services for homes and businesses through the release of smart network features, such as providing a sudden boost to broadband speed.”

Built in-house

The parties claim Nucleus and Dynamo are industry firsts, and they will be being built in-house by Vodafone and Google Cloud specialist teams.
 
Up to 1,000 employees of both companies located in Spain, the UK, and the US are collaborating on the project. Dynamo will be able to  process 50TB of data per day. 
 
Johan Wibergh, Chief Technology Officer for Vodafone (pictured), said: “Vodafone is building a powerful foundation for a digital future.
 
“We have vast amounts of data which, when securely processed and made available across our footprint using the collective power of Vodafone and Google Cloud’s engineering expertise, will transform our services, to our customers and governments, and the societies where they live and serve.”
 
Vodafone has identified more than 700 use-cases to deliver new products and services quickly across its markets to support fact-based decisions, cut costs, remove duplication of data sources, and simplify and centralise operations.
 
The speed and ease with which Vodafone’s operating companies in multiple countries can access its data analytics, intelligence, and machine-learning capabilities will also be vastly improved.
 
Some of the expected key benefits are:

• better mobile, fixed, and TV content and connectivity services due to instant availability of highly personalised rewards, content, and applications – such as a speed boost to broadband.
• to increase Google Cloud’s footprint from eight markets to all of Vodafone’s so the operator Vodafone can match network roll-out to consumer demand, increase capacity at critical times, and use machine learning to predict, detect and fix issues before they affect customers.
• to enable data scientists to collaborate on environmental and health issues in 11 countries using automated machine learning tools. Vodafone is assisting governments and aid organisations, upon their request, with secure, anonymised, and aggregated movement data to tackle COVID-19. This partnership will help to provide deeper insights, in accordance with local laws and regulations, into the spread of disease through intelligent analytics across a wider geographical area.
• to provide a digital twin of many of Vodafone’s internal support functions using AI and analytics It supports analytic models running on Google Cloud to cut response times to enquiries and predict demand. The system will also run a digital twin of Vodafone’s infrastructure worldwide.

 Vodafone will move its entire SAP environment to Google Cloud, including core SAP workloads and corporate SAP modules like SAP Central Finance.
 
On the back of their collaborative work, Vodafone and Google Cloud will also explore opportunities to provide consultancy services, offered either jointly or independently, to other multi-national organisations and businesses.

Is Telecom Italia keeping Huawei out of its 5G network?

A Reuters report suggests the operator is going to cancel a contract with the Chinese vendor, adding to its mounting woes.

Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) is looking to cancel a contract with Huawei for supplying equipment to build part of the telecom firm’s 5G network in Italy, Reuters reported, citing three sources.

Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore broke the story that Telecom Italia sent a letter informing Huawei of its intention to call off the contract.

Blow for Huawei

Telecom Italia is one of Huawei’s biggest clients in Europe – the Sweden and UK governments have already banned the use of the vendor’s equipment in 5G infrastructure and are gradually removing installed.

The United States has pressured many countries to ban Huawei equipment, claiming the vendor’s equipment could be used by the Chinese state to spy. Huawei denies the allegations. Telecom Italia and Huawei declined to comment.

The Italian company originally planned to award the contract to Huawei and Ericsson, but later added Nokia Reuters reported last December.

Now the contract will be split between Ericsson and Nokia, two of the sources said.

No legal ban

Italy has not imposed an outright ban on Huawei, but under current legislation it can impose strict conditions on 5G deals involving non-EU vendors.

Telecom Italia’s move follows a review of its supply policy, including a cost and benefit analysis, one of the sources said.

The company had already ruled out Huawei from the core of its 5G network, where sensitive data are processed, by not inviting the Chinese company to a tender last year.

Falling revenues

This week Huawei said its network business had maintained steady growth, although in 2020, that part of its business only grew by 0.2% compared with 3.8% the year before and brought in $46.7 billion – a third of the total.

The growth was 23.6% in 2016, before the Trump Administration imposed bans and sanctions and pressured other countries to do the same.

As Huawei is prevented from buying components made with US expertise or technology, it cannot use silicon from Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, and is obliged to run on what it has in stock.

It remains to be seen whether that inventory will carry it until new options, such as making its own chips materialise, or it will be forced to use less advanced ones.

This would further damage its ability to compete in the 5G market.

BT offers managed, secure SD-WAN using Fortinet tech

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SD-WAN is designed to allow firms of all sizes to improve application and user experience and flexibilty at less cost by using a hybrid network.

BT is to improve its Managed Firewall service with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, providing multi-national companies with security and connectivity combined in a single appliance.

BT says experts support customers at every stage of deployment and operation, from initial set-up and roll-out through ongoing monitoring, management and enhancement.

However, SD-WAN provides a wider attack surface, so perimeter-based security is insufficient.

Overlay overload

Some companies address this issue by overlaying security as an afterthought have introduced unnecessary cost, complexity, and cyber risk into their network, according to Fortinet.

The operator says its provides a consistent level of service for organisations’ differing digital maturity, infrastructures and business needs.

All functions are managed as a single entity allowing customers to add devices and infrastructure to their network.

Through continuing threat assessment and detection, BT can also support customers by identifying and preventing attacks, and mitigate damages after a breach.

Secure service

The secure SD-WAN service can be configured to prioritise business-critical traffic and real-time services for optimised network and application performance, accelerating the adoption and integration of cloud services.

Customers can manage all sites, troubleshoot and enable Secure SD-WAN to new and existing branches from one screen. By deploying a single integrated security and network WAN edge solution, customers can benefit from reduced costs and improved return on investment.

BT and Fortinet have worked as partners for over a decade.“Fortinet’s security-driven networking approach from the WAN edge to the cloud edge via SASE is trusted by service providers globally. We are pleased to continue our long-standing partnership with BT to enable global customers to securely access applications and workloads from anywhere,” said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet.

Vodafone’s Open RAN Blueprint is a radical shift in hardware development

By Malik Saadi, Vice President, Strategic Technologies, ABI Research

Qualcomm and Vodafone are joining efforts to co-create a practical blueprint to make it easier for infrastructure suppliers to build 5G equipment using Open Radio Access Network (RAN) technology.

These reference designs are expected to be ready in 2021 with trials planned for 2H 2022 and commercial deployment to follow soon after that.


Market dynamics in 2021


According to ABI Research’s market data and forecasts, Open RAN attracted a very minor market share in 2020, close to 0.5% of total cellular network deployments.

This is expected to increase to 2% in 2021 but is still a very small share compared to the traditional RAN market. In North America, ABI Research expects 75,000 Open RAN radios to be deployed in 2021, when there will be more than 3 million traditional radios in the same continent.

Although Open RAN promises significant benefits, the market has yet to create the necessary products, economies of scale, and adoption rates in early 2021.

Despite the current focus on open interfaces, Open RAN has already provided a glimpse into the future of mobile networks, including the innovation that will likely enter the network through the radio interface controller (RIC).

Greenfield operators

In 2021, Open RAN deployments are limited to greenfield operators for large-scale deployments. Brownfield operators are still exploring their options and adopting the new technology without disruption to their commercial, technology, and operational plans.

This is an important aspect to consider, especially when considering that Open RAN networks are still facing integration challenges with legacy infrastructure.

However, it is essential for brownfield operators to embrace the technology and drive interest toward solving these integration issues and allow the new technology to be deployed in urban areas, rather than be limited to niche use cases and rural deployments.

For these reasons, new coalitions have been formed:
•    In the US, the Open RAN Policy Coalition was formed to drive the adoption of open and interoperable solutions in the RAN. Members include AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

•    In Europe, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to drive the adoption of Open RAN throughout their footprints, which Italy’s TIM has joined.

Need for scale

Several of these operators have expressed their support for the new technology, including Vodafone, which stated that it is expecting to deploy Open RAN in rural areas in 2021 and in urban areas in 2022.

However, Vodafone Group’s CEO, Nick Read, also stated that “…we need operators to scale this to improve functionality and efficiency going forward.” Clearly, the technology has room to improve, especially for urban deployments.

To address this, the telco infrastructure supply chain is evolving, with chipset vendors now developing flexible chipsets that can power Open RAN equipment.

Traditionally, telco infrastructure, particularly radios and baseband units, have relied on custom silicon that took years to develop, thus requiring heavy upfront investment that few companies could afford.

These new flexible chipsets will enable new types of companies to create equipment that can be used in large-scale deployments.

Needed: product blueprints

The two ends of the equipment supply chain are very limited, with a few large vendors on one end (Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia), and a few small vendors on the other (Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless).

What is needed to help small and new companies create this much-needed innovation, especially in the radio domain? These companies need to focus on network software and protocol stacks, rather than hardware or system design.

The emergence of advanced Open RAN chipsets from companies like Intel, Xilinx, Marvell, Qualcomm, Fujitsu and NEC supporting advanced features, such as massive Multiple-Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) in 2020, has been an encouraging step toward the maturity of Open RAN technology.

It is not enough to widen market opportunities of the technology beyond greenfield implementations: we need suitable and specific network blueprints and implementation guidelines to enable system integrators and operators to piece together different elements to create a full-fledged network.

Next major step

Network reference designs and blueprints are the next major step in the development and maturity of Open RAN and an essential one in taking the technology to large-scale deployment.

These blueprints will help with simplifying the complex development of mobile networks and give smaller vendors a process to follow to create equipment with well-defined interfaces between the different network elements, especially if these blueprints are endorsed by Tier 1 mobile operators.

The availability of these network blueprints will remove much uncertainty and unlock development paths for them.

It will also enable them to drive innovation through their expertise, rather than spending effort and capital to build radio systems and end-to-end network equipment themselves.

Therefore, ABI Research expects that the Qualcomm and Vodafone blueprint is a major development in the Open RAN ecosystem that will allow smaller vendors to create the rapid innovation that Open RAN has promised.

Innovative democracy

Conforming to this blueprint will democratize technology development, with common implementation guidelines accelerating interoperability and helping vendors create equipment that is compatible with this blueprint.

This can lead to large-scale deployments, simplify interoperability testing and compliance with Open RAN standards, and create the foundation for new types of innovation.

Moreover, a common development blueprint for 5G radio units (RUs) and distributed units (DUs) can also create the critical mass of component demand, allowing equipment vendors to reach economies of scale for their equipment sooner. The partnership between Qualcomm and Vodafone may well be the best approach to creating Open RAN blueprints:
•    Qualcomm has considerable expertise in the radio domain and is independent of infrastructure vendor priorities. Moreover, the company has a track record in the 3rd Generation Public Partnership (3GPP) and relevant standards, with a good understand of both technology roadmaps and the implementation challenges any vendor is facing. The company has managed to build a strong expertise in radio design, computing integration, and system-level design from the RU to the centralized unit (CU) and DU.
•    Vodafone is a leading operator in terms of technology development and was one of the leading operators for the evolution of 5G Standalone (SA) and a pioneer for many new concepts, including Single RAN.

Anecdotally, Vodafone and Qualcomm were the pioneers behind the launch of the Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G New Radio (NR) framework back in late 2017. It comes as no surprise to ABI Research that the two companies are joining forces to mark another millstone in 5G history: the diversification of the 5G supply chain through the adoption of the reference design approach.

Involving standards

ABI Research expects that the launch of this blueprint will be the beginning of a long series of announcements toward the democratization of the open networks market. The company expects to see many equipment announcements and even adoption of this blueprint by many operators, especially in Europe where Vodafone has signed an MoU with other Tier 1 operators.

Moreover, Qualcomm and Vodafone can learn from the application of this blueprint to 3GPP, the O-RAN Alliance, and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN, and push for changes that will make deploying future open networks more effective.

The creation of this blueprint is a catalyst that will accelerate the creation of interoperable, scalable, and cost-effective equipment that will be on par with Tier 1 vendor infrastructure. ABI Research expects several market developments following this announcement:
1. These blueprints will accelerate innovation by enabling the Open RAN ecosystem to adopt new features and 3GPP specifications as soon as the standard releases are ratified. ABI Research has been bullish about Open RAN and expects this to overtake traditional RAN by 2030. The Qualcomm-Vodafone blueprint is one foundation for this to happen.
2. They will enable developers to focus on developing software and innovative ideas, tapping into RAN interfaces, rather than focusing on hardware development, which has been a significant barrier of market entry.
3. In Europe, these blueprints will help operators avoid vendor lock-ins, especially when some have been forced to remove Chinese equipment from their networks.
4. The availability of blueprints can create innovation and new developments in areas that have been dominated by large infrastructure vendors, most importantly massive MIMO, and potentially carrier aggregation and dual connectivity in the future. These blueprints can enable many new small vendors to enter the market and make innovation central for differentiating their products.

These are a few examples where the Qualcomm-Vodafone blueprints can create significant traction for the Open RAN space. Several questions remain regarding these blueprints, such as how detailed they will be or the level of hardware dependence, but overall, their creation is a sign of true acceleration of Open RAN.

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