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Base launches fixed internet and TV in Belgium 

Simon Dux
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Base launches fixed internet and TV in Belgium 

The Telenet-owned mobile operator is betting the discounted bundles will help it combat churn

Belgian mobile operator Base is entering the fixed internet and TV market from today, promising consumers that they can choose their own services and only pay for what they need. To increase customer stickiness, the operator is also launching the services with “a life-long discount” if they opt for several Base products.  

The imaginatively named services are Base Internet, Base TV, along with the existing Base Mobile – the latter is celebrating its 25th year as a brand. Each product can be purchased separately (without even being a Base mobile customer), and, if the customer chooses to purchase several products, he or she gets a lifetime discount. The same principles apply to both individuals and the self-employed. 

To offer its fixed services, Base will rely on two distinct networks, depending on the geographical location of its customers. In Flanders, in 2/3 of the communes of Brussels and in the Botte du Hainaut region of Wallonia, this will be the cable network (HFC) of WYRE, the joint venture between Telenet (66.8%) and Fluvius.

In Wallonia and the rest of Brussels (six communes), Base will rely on the VOO/Orange Belgium cable network (HFC), thanks to the wholesale agreement signed in 2023 giving access to that network for 15 years.   

Base Internet has two flavours 

Customers can choose between a limited or an unlimited offer. With limited Internet, Base customers who surf moderately receive 300GB of data per month and get download speeds of 50Mbps and upload speeds of 5Mbps. With the unlimited offer there is no volume limit and download speeds of 200Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps are available.  

For television, Base TV offers the option of watching programmes via the Base TV box or the Base TV app. The latter can be used in the same way as all conventional streaming apps (smartphone, tablet, TV screen via Chromecast, Apple TV, smart TV, and so on).

Regarding programming, the operator has opted for the essentials, and offers the most popular channels: 28 French-language and 28 Dutch-language channels. Customers can choose the language version they prefer or combine the two as an option. Base TV also offers recording (up to 200 hours), replay (36 hours), pause and forward.  

 The box also offers simple, one-click access to the most popular streaming apps. Base claims its box is the smallest available on the Belgian market. Thanks to its small size (8 cm x 8 cm x 1.8 cm), the box can be fitted to the back of the TV. This box does not need to be connected to a coaxial cable: the TV signal passes entirely through Base Internet. Made from 100% recycled materials, Base said the box is “particularly energy-efficient” compared to other models, thanks to its low power consumption (maximum 3W).  

Targeting the south of the country 

“This new stage in the history of Base is also a turning point for Telenet Group,” said Telenet CEO John Porter. We are pursuing a twofold goal with this new offer: extending our geographical coverage with a fixed-line service offer (internet and TV) in the south of the country, where we were not previously present, and simultaneously offering a complete range of telecoms services throughout the country to customers looking for the best value for money, a market segment to which Telenet Group did not previously offer a solution.” 

He added: “Given that it is already well established in both Wallonia and this market segment, the decision to use our Base brand was an obvious one. In a way, one could say it was our missing link: with our three brands, Base, Telenet and TADAAM, we aim to complement each other and are now ideally positioned to meet the varied needs of consumers. Everyone can choose the brand and products that suit them best.”  

Customer complaints

The telco has been in the wars recently as it drew the wrath of Belgian’s Telecommunications Ombudsman after customer complaints soared following the implementation of a new IT system.  

“By adding internet and TV to our mobile offer, we are now opening a new chapter in the history of BASE. It’s a natural evolution of the brand: by complementing our offer with these new services, we’ll be able to respond to consumer needs even more effectively,” said Telenet Group Base Brand Manager Gérald Demortier.

“As a challenger in this new market, Base intends to remain true to its identity. No unnecessary extras: everyone should feel free to choose what he or she really needs: there’s no need for a mobile subscription if this is already paid by the employer, nor a TV subscription if everything is watched online, let alone unlimited Internet if it’s not being used to its full potential.”  

For the first three months, Base will offer free installation and activation of the Internet and TV services (after which there will be a charge of €59). 

Nvidia unveils new data centre GPU architecture called Rubin 

Simon Dux
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Nvidia unveils new data centre GPU architecture called Rubin 

The new GPU architecture, reportedly arriving in 2026, demonstratres Nvidia thinks model parameters will keep surging

Data centre builders and operators have only just not got their heads around how to deal with 100+ kW racks in terms of heat and power but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang raised the stake at Taiwan’s Computex 2024 event, announcing the new GPU architecture called Rubin during his keynote.  

The Rubin GPU will feature 8 stacks of the newer HBM4 memory with a roadmap to Rubin Ultra that would eventually feature 12 HBM4 stacks. In addition, Nvidia plans to introduce a successor to its Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell chips, taking the form of a new Vera Rubin board with the Veru CPU. The company didn’t reveal the key specs for the powerful new board but it would support the latest NVLink 6 switches which do offer speeds up to 1.8Tbps bidirectionally.   

Vera Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves – and established the presence of dark matter.  

Staying ahead of the pack  

Nvidia is renowned for staying ahead of the pack and given its overwhelming marketshare, the only way is down if it doesn’t. The announcements effectively spell out its AI roadmap for the next few years but it also demonstrates that the plan is to make models bigger and bigger in the hope they will get better and better. This has big ramifications for future data centres in terms of physical size and power use.  

It is important not to jump ahead too far given the next-generation Blackwell GPUs aren’t probably going to be with us until later this year when we’ll see the the B100 and B200 GPUs beginning to arrive. Huang then pointed out the Blackwell Ultra will be next – which will include 12 HBM3E compatibility. The roadmap will see Rubin architecture turning up in 2026 followed by an Ultra version a year or so later, all in line with Nvidia’s “one year rhythm” for data centre releases. Smaller chip makers will struggle to match that sort of pace.  

As Dr Richard Windsor points out in his latest Radio Free Mobile blog, Blackwell can train the same model as Hopper on one-quarter the number of GPUs and one-quarter the power consumption. This will become a key factor when deploying clusters because power consumption one of the biggest costs in running a data centre.  

Linear or exponential 

Nvidia laid out its response to the launch of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) advocacy group last week which is essentially trying to break the market leader’s inter-chip communication dominance with a new non NVLink standard. The company also covered multiple bases so unveiled its Ethernet roadmap at Computex. Huang unveiled plans for the annual release of Spectrum-X products to cater for the growing demand for high-performance Ethernet networking for AI. Its Spectrum X600 is designed to link 10s of thousands of GPUs with the X800 Ultra being designed to link 100s of thousands of GPUs and the X1600 to link millions of GPUs. 

As Windsor points out, the AI industry intends to keep growing its model size to trillions and then tens of trillions of parameters in size, hoping for exponential performance improvements. However, there are signs the exponential parameter growth is delivering only linear improvements in performance. If this turns out to be true, the return on investment for training ever-larger models evaporates.  

While this will contribute to the end of the AI bubble, the sheer performance of these architectures gives telcos an opportunity to be more radical at their network edges. However, watching the declining enterprise revenues across many telcos, this door is at risk of closing before many plant their foot in it.  

Zegona pulls off Europe’s biggest reverse takeover acquiring Vodafone Spain

Annie Turner
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Zegona pulls off Europe’s biggest reverse takeover acquiring Vodafone Spain

The highly successful, seasoned veteran José Miguel García will lead the management team

The British investment fund, Zegona Communications, has completed the takeover of Vodafone Spain for £5 billion (€5.877 billion). This comprises €4.1 billion in cash and €0.9 billion in the form of redeemable preference shares. Zegona says this is the biggest reverse takeover in the European telecoms sector.

The management team will be led by José Miguel García, who has a track record of delivering huge returns to investors the Spanish telecommunications market. For example, after his tenure as CEO of regional telco Euskaltel, it was sold to MasMovil in for €3.5 billion in 2021, making an 87% return for Zegona’s shareholders. Read Zegona’s Chair and CEO talking about the strategy for Euskaltel in 2020 here.

Prior to that García was CEO at Jazztel from 2006 to 2015, where he was instrumental in delivering 4x revenue growth during that period. The sale of Jazztel to Orange in 2015 for €3.4 billion yielded €2.8 billion – a six times return on investment – during his time as CEO. 

Changing landscape

Orange acquired MasMovil earlier this year to form Masorange, which is now Spain’s largest converged telecoms operator, overtaking incumbent Telefonica. The merger was approved with remedies by the European Union to bolster competition, in the form of bolstering Digi as Spain’s fourth mobile operator.

Under the terms of the Zegona acquisition, the new entity will continue to use the Vodafone brand and Vodafone proper will continue to provide certain services to Vodafone Spain and maintain a presence in Spain through its Innovation Hub in Málaga. 

Earlier this week, Finetwork renewed its wholesale contract (which began in 2019) with Vodafone Spain under which it will use Vodafone’s mobile and fibre network for another ten years.

In February, Spanish newspaper El Economista reported that Zegona was in negotiations to acquire Avatel Telecom, a rural broadband provider in Spain. Zegona is not the only potential acquirer: Telefonica and H.I.G. Capital are also said to be interested.

However, according to Spanish media, Avatel is seeking to consolidate – it has reportedly acquired 155 companies since 2016 – and is engaged in somewhat tense negotiations about redundancies with unions.

Zegona’s path to profit

Zegona was set up in 2015 by former Virgin Media execs Eamonn O’Hare (pictured) and Robert Samuelson. It has five employees and, according to its website, its business model is ‘Buy-Fix-Sell’ to deliver attractive shareholder returns. This is its third transaction: the first was acquiring Asturian telecommunications operator Telecable in 2015. Telecable was sold to Euskaltel in 2017, at which point Zegona acquired a 15% ownership of Euskaltel.

Last November Zegona raised £300 million from investors despite tough market conditions.

O’Hare commented, “We have now completed the acquisition of Vodafone Spain and look forward to transforming the business and returning it to growth. I am pleased to welcome José Miguel García to lead Vodafone Spain as CEO, reuniting a team that has a proven track record of highly successful operational transformations in Spanish telecoms. 

 “The new 10-year network access agreement signed with Finetwork earlier this week demonstrates our ability to move swiftly on our well-defined strategy. With our proven track record, we are confident we will improve the performance of Vodafone Spain whilst delivering significant value for shareholders.” 

Ericsson, Telcaria collaborate to improve 5G’s energy efficiency

Annie Turner
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Ericsson, Telcaria collaborate to improve 5G’s energy efficiency

Spain’s Telcaria is part of the 5TONIC co-innovation lab – this new project will be overseen by a not-for-profit R&D institution and receive public funding

Ericsson and Telcaria, the Spanish telecommunications R&D specialist which is active in the 5TONIC co-innovation lab, are to jointly develop new ways of improving 5G’s energy efficiency – without affecting the network’s performance at speeds up to 1Gbps.

The partnership is part of a larger project researching wireless networking called 6G DAWN. This began in 2022 and is overseen by non-profit research institution CTTC. It is funded by the Spanish Government’s Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan via the UNICO I+D 5G programme.

The partners are adopting a public-private integrated network (PNI-NPN) approach to improve the observability and predictability of network use, performance and energy consumption.

To do this they have established a private 5G network on CTTC premises, connected to the 5TONIC lab which includes technologies like digital twins of networks and their exposure.

5G is the most energy efficient mobile network technology so far. Its architecture and the use of AI and machine learning make it up to 10 times more energy efficient per gigabyte than 4G. 5G can lead to big cost savings for enterprises, making their business operations more efficient and sustainable.

Threat actors destroyed hundreds of thousands of routers from one service provider 

Simon Dux
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Threat actors destroyed hundreds of thousands of routers from one service provider 

Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs finally reveals what happened to the US ISP last October

An investigation by Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs has revealed what happened when more than 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers were taken offline, with all belonging to a single ISP. The incident took place over a 72-hour period between October 25-27, rendered the infected devices permanently inoperable, and required a hardware-based replacement.  

Public scan data confirmed the sudden and precipitous removal of 49% of all modems from the impacted ISP’s autonomous system number (ASN) during this time period. While Lumen demurred to name the ISP, Reuters has linked the massive outage to Windstream after customers began flooding message boards last October with reports their routers had suddenly stopped working and remained unresponsive to reboots and all other attempts to revive them. 

The October incident, which was not disclosed at the time, was one of the most serious cyberattacks ever against the US’s telecommunications sector. 

Lumen’s analysis identified “Chalubo,” a commodity remote access trojan (RAT), as the primary payload responsible for the event. This trojan, first identified in 2018, employed savvy tradecraft to obfuscate its activity; it removed all files from disk to run in-memory, assumed a random process name already present on the device, and encrypted all communications with the command and control (C2) server.  

“We suspect these factors contributed to there being only one report on the Chalubo malware family to date,” wrote the authors in a blog post. “Chalubo has payloads designed for all major SOHO/IoT kernels, pre-built functionality to perform DDoS attacks, and can execute any Lua script sent to the bot. We suspect the Lua functionality was likely employed by the malicious actor to retrieve the destructive payload.” 

Lumen’s global telemetry indicates the Chalubo malware family was highly active in November 2023 and remained so into early 2024. Based on a 30-day snapshot in October, Lumen identified over 330,000 unique IP addresses that communicated with one of 75 observed C2 nodes for at least two days, indicating a confirmed infection.  

This suggests that while the Chalubo malware was used in this destructive attack, it was not written specifically for destructive actions. “We suspect the threat actors behind this event chose a commodity malware family to obfuscate attribution, instead of using a custom-developed toolkit. At this time, we do not have an overlap between this activity and any known nation-state activity clusters,” said Lumen. “We assess with high confidence that the malicious firmware update was a deliberate act intended to cause an outage, and though we expected to see a number of routers make and models affected across the internet, this event was confined to the single ASN.” 

Attacking two router vendor models 

The attack notably affected rural and underserved communities within the ISP’s service area. Residents in these areas potentially lost access to emergency services, agricultural monitoring systems, and healthcare providers, highlighting the severe consequences of the disruption. 

 Lumen saw that initial complaints emerged in late October 2023, focusing on ActionTec T3200s and T3260s devices, which showed a static red light. Investigation revealed a firmware issue leading to a significant drop in the number of exposed devices, confirmed by scan data from Censys. The ISP’s ActionTec and Sagemcom F5380 modems were primarily affected. Lumen observed a drop of around 179k IP addresses that had an ActionTec banner and a drop of around 480k devices associated with Sagemcom.  

Ramifications of the attack 

Black Lotus Labs said the investigation stood out for two reasons. First, this campaign resulted in a hardware-based replacement of the affected devices, which likely indicates that the attacker corrupted the firmware on specific models. “The event was unprecedented due to the number of units affected – no attack that we can recall has required the replacement of over 600,000 devices.” 

In addition, they said this type of attack has only ever happened once before, with AcidRain used as a precursor to an active military invasion. “At this time, we do not assess this to be the work of a nation-state or state-sponsored entity,” said Lumen. “In fact, we have not observed any overlap with known destructive activity clusters; particularly those prone to destructive events such as Volt Typhoon, or SeaShell Blizzard.” 

 The second unique aspect is that this campaign was confined to a particular ASN. “Most previous campaigns we’ve seen target a specific router model or common vulnerability and have effects across multiple providers’ networks,” said Lumen.  

“Destructive attacks of this nature are highly concerning, especially so in this case,” concluded Lumen. “A sizeable portion of this ISP’s service area covers rural or underserved communities; places where residents may have lost access to emergency services, farming concerns may have lost critical information from remote monitoring of crops during the harvest, and health care providers cut off from telehealth or patients’ records.” 

 

Rivals join forces against Nvidia’s AI accelerator dominance 

Simon Dux
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Rivals join forces against Nvidia’s AI accelerator dominance 

AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Meta and Microsoft form Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) advocacy group to boost AI connectivity in data centres

A broad industry alliance of data centre infrastructure companies has joined forces to address Nvidia’s dominance of AI computing accelerators and more specifically, the superfast networking technology that makes them work.  

Current AI compute clusters are different to older computers because the interconnect in the individual computing nodes now connects directly to the AI accelerators (or GPUs). In these systems, each computing node (a single unit within the cluster) has its AI accelerators directly connected to each other, bypassing the CPUs. This direct connection allows the AI accelerators to quickly share data and work together to handle large AI models that a single accelerator’s memory can’t accommodate on its own. 

Additionally, these AI accelerators are not only connected within a single node but also have external connections. These connections link multiple nodes together through high-speed switches, enabling fast and efficient communication between nodes. This setup ensures that data can be transferred with high bandwidth and low latency, which is crucial for processing large AI workloads effectively. 

NVLink rules 

The issue is that Nvidia owns this space with its proprietary NVLink. As a result, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Meta and Microsoft announced that they are aligned on the development of the open interconnect Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) instead of each using their own various links. In this way, they want the Ultra Accelerator Link to form the external bridge between a maximum of 1,024 nodes in an AI cluster. 

By creating an interconnection based on open standards, UALink will enable OEMs, IT professionals and systems integrators to create a path to greater ease of integration, greater flexibility and scalability of their AI-connected data centres. 

Specification 1.0 will allow up to 1,024 accelerators in an AI compute pod and allow direct loads and stores between memory connected to accelerators, such as GPUs, in the pod. The UALink promoter group has formed the UALink Consortium and expects its incorporation to occur in the third quarter of 2024.  

Specification 1.0 is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2024 and will be made available to companies participating in the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium. It will enable direct data transfers between the memory attached to accelerators, such as AMD’s Instinct GPUs or specialized processors like Intel’s Gaudi.  

AI milestone 

“The work done by companies at UALink in creating a fabric of open, high-performance, and scalable accelerators is essential to the future of AI. Together, we bring extensive experience in creating large-scale AI and high-performance computing solutions based on open standards, efficiency, and robust ecosystem support,” said AMD Data Center Solutions Group EVP and GM Forrest Norrod. 

“It is essential to support an open ecosystem collaboration to enable scaling networks with a variety of high-speed, low-latency solutions,” said Broadcom Data Center Solutions Group VP and GM Jas Tremblay.  

“Very high-performance interconnects become increasingly important as AI workloads continue to grow in size and scope,” said Cisco Common Hardware Group EVP Martin Lund. “Together, we are committed to developing UALink, which will be a scalable and open solution to help overcome some of the challenges in developing AI supercomputers.” 

“As a founding member of the industry’s UALink consortium, we look forward to contributing our expertise in high-performance networks and systems, and collaborating on the development of a new open standard for accelerator interconnects for the next generation of supercomputing,” said HPE HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions SVP and GM Trish Damkroger.  

“UALink is an important milestone in the advancement of artificial intelligence computing. Intel is proud to jointly lead this new technology and bring our expertise in creating an open, dynamic AI ecosystem,” said Intel Network and Edge Group SVP and GM Sachin Katti. “This initiative extends Intel’s commitment to AI connectivity innovation, which includes leadership roles in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium and other standards organisations.”  

“In a short space of time, the technology sector has accepted challenges that AI and HPC have revealed. Interconnecting accelerators like GPUs requires a holistic perspective in seeking to improve efficiency and performance,” said Ultra Ethernet Consortium president J Metz. “At UEC, we believe that UALink’s scaling approach to troubleshooting pod clusters complements our own scaling protocol. We also look forward to collaborating together on creating an open, industry-wide ecosystem-friendly solution that solves both types of needs in the future.”  

The future with Ethernet 

It makes sense for the Ultra Ethernet Consortium to be involved in this initiative. It was formed last Summer by Intel, AMD, Meta, HPE, and others for high performance networking and Ultra Accelerator Link complements this work by linking GPUs within pods. 

There is plenty of work happening on the Ethernet front like Remote DMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) which can be used for high-performance networking of clusters. Even the companies involved in UAUlinLink are working on 800G Ethernet adaptors and work is already happening on the specification for 1.6-TBit Ethernet (IEEE P802.3dj draft). The Ultra Ethernet Consortium has been working since last year, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation on its plan to accelerate all parts of Ethernet including the Physical Layer, Link Layer, Transport Layer and Software Layer. 

Orange completes merger to further converged strategy in Romania

Annie Turner
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Orange completes merger to further converged strategy in Romania

After the merger, Orange Group will hold 80% of the share capital and voting rights and the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization the other 20%

Orange announces the completion of the merger between Orange Romania (ORO) and Orange Romania Communications (OROC) through the integration of OROC by ORO. This merger will create a converged telco from 1 June 2024. 

The consolidated company will further Orange’s objective of becoming the preferred provider of fixed-mobile convergent services on the Romanian market, for the residential and business segments. The idea is that it will also stimulate investment and competition in Romania’s telecoms sector in Romania.

After the merger, Orange Group will hold 80% of the share capital and the voting rights of the consolidated entity, while the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization will hold 20% of the share capital and voting rights.

Orange Romania acquired 54% shares in the fixed services operator, Orange Romania Communications (previously Telekom Romania Communications) in 2021. Since then it and Orange consolidated contact channels for OROC customers launched the first joint commercial offer.

The merger brings minimal changes to the day-to-day use of Orange services but will allow the company to remove barriers to full operational integration. For example, allowing them to consolidate the companies’ customer databases and IT.

Bogdan Ivan, Minister of Research, Innovation, and Digitalization in Romania, commented,  “This merger is a recognition of Romania’s strength in telecommunications infrastructure and shows the potential of our country to become a regional hub for connectivity. Through the Ministry’s holding in the new company, we will work to improve the quality of telecommunications services for all users in Romania.”

“The merger between Orange Romania S.A. and Orange Romania Communications S.A. is a major step for Orange and marks the fruition of the process with the Government of Romania,” said Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, Executive Vice President, CEO of Orange Europe. Julien Ducarroz, Orange Romania CEO, added, “The way ahead is now clear, and we will concentrate all our efforts on delivering an improved experience for customers, while getting even closer to our main objective of becoming the preferred choice for convergent services in Romania

Singtel, KKR jointly bid for 20% stake in global data centre firm

Annie Turner
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Singtel, KKR jointly bid for 20% stake in global data centre firm

The two are thought to be the most likely to land the stake in ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, for $1bn

Singtel and private equity company KKR are jointly bidding for a stake of up to 20% of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) for $1 billion (€0.92 billion). Reuters suggests it is the frontrunner in the bidding process. The other potential bidder is Stonepeak. The outcome is expected in be made public in early June.

ST GDC runs datacentres in Singapore, the UK, Germany, India, Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, where it recently set up a joint venture with VNG, a local tech firm.

Data and AI

According to ST GDC, global demand for data and AI services is boosting the use of cloud and datacentre services, reflected in a raft of recent announcements.

For example, last week Singtel announced its new strategy, Singtel28, “a new growth plan to deliver enhanced customer experiences and sustained value realisation for shareholders”. It identified the new growth engines as ICT and datacentres. It plans to scale up operations in both, and expand its Nxera datacentre division in the Asia-Pacific region.

Orange and AWS partner to deliver cloud services in Morocco and Senegal 

Simon Dux
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Orange and AWS partner to deliver cloud services in Morocco and Senegal 

Not only is this the first AWS Wavelength Zones in Africa, but also the first Wavelength Zones in countries without an existing AWS Region or AWS Local Zone

Orange Middle East & Africa (OMEA) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced they are bringing AWS Wavelength to Morocco and Senegal later this year, supporting use cases across regulated industries that require data to remain local, such as telecom, finance, public sector, and healthcare, as well as industries that depend on low-latency applications like gaming. 

The new Wavelength Zones will support Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types such as gp2. Users can also access Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon EMR and Application Load Balancer (ALB) to support a broad set of workloads. 

With AWS Wavelength, customers can take advantage of the cloud’s on-demand scaling and pay-as-you-go pricing model, enabling them to keep their data localized while benefiting from the same reliable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure as AWS Regions. By extending AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to localized in-country infrastructure, AWS Wavelength allows customers to process and store their data locally while leveraging the scalability and security of the AWS Cloud. 

Orange and AWS said these are the first AWS Wavelength Zones directly accessible both through wireless and wireline connections, allowing any customer to deploy and run applications locally on AWS compute and storage located in Orange data centres.  

As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, Orange has a strong track record of supporting enterprises on their cloud journeys and will leverage the new local infrastructure capabilities, as well as existing AWS Regions, to foster cloud adoption in Africa. Orange will also be an anchor customer for the AWS Wavelength Zones, running some of its IT workloads in-country. 

“The announcement of AWS Wavelength Zones for North & West Africa is a major achievement in our strategy to foster the cloud transformation of African businesses,” said Orange Middle East and Africa CEO Jérôme Hénique (above). “We are providing the benefits of AWS to Moroccan and Senegalese organizations, from SMBs to MNCs, while ensuring data residency in secure Orange datacentres in combination with our best-in-class connectivity solutions.” 

Regionless zones 

Historically, AWS Wavelength Zones have existed in countries with AWS Regions. According to the partners, this announcement showcases “a new and evolved AWS Wavelength Zone design” to help meet the needs of customers in these emerging geographies, providing the key benefit of bringing AWS services into countries without an AWS Region or AWS Local Zone.  

Customers can deploy their applications to AWS compute and storage located within Orange’s data centres in Morocco and Senegal, so application traffic only needs to travel from the device to the local AWS Wavelength Zone either via Orange’s network or the network of another mobile or internet service provider. With the new design, customers can deploy applications with low latency and granular data residency controls, providing further choice to help customers address stringent data residency requirements, such as in-country for regulatory, contractual, or security reasons. 

“The deployment of AWS Wavelength Zones in North and West Africa, in collaboration with Orange, will further empower customers in growing geographies with local AWS services,” said AWS VP of EC2 Edge Jan Hofmeyr. “Customers of all sizes and all industries in Morocco and Senegal will be able to access local AWS compute and storage for data residency, low latency, and security needs for applications across real-time gaming and regulated industries, helping customers unlock new innovation and accelerate digital transformation.” 

Happy gamers 

To prove the point the partners asked local telco-grade gaming technology provider Swarmio whether the arrival of AWS via Orange was a good thing. “There is a dynamic and growing gamer community in Africa, including Morocco and Senegal, and we want to provide them with advanced gaming experiences but run into technical hurdles involving locally available cloud services,” said Swarmio CEO and founder Vijai Karthigesu. “AWS Wavelength will help us transform the worldwide gaming landscape by combining the power of AWS with our Swarmio Edge platform to provide an unmatched, low-latency experience that allows creators to connect and delights global game publishers and developers.” 

 

KPN launches hybrid 4G/5G edge services for industry 

Simon Dux
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KPN launches hybrid 4G/5G edge services for industry 

The new Campus service is a combination of 5G, on-premises and edge compute, indoor localisation and business LAN

KPN has launched its new 4G/5G edge service which wraps together on-premises computing, indoor localisation and LAN for enterprises – various options of these will be added to the service over the coming months. The operator is pitching the service as “secure and reliable infrastructure and services” which it can deliver three ways: via the public 5G, hybrid public and private and fully private 5G networks. 

The operator said the new service family is its response to the growing need for more autonomy, reliability and guarantees for on-site infrastructure. Industrial services require more than just speed and connectivity. They also need a high level of security, high-quality (indoor) coverage, availability guarantees and fast response times. 

“We want to be at the forefront of 5G connectivity and relevant applications that meet the needs of our customers,” said KPN chief business market and executive board member Chantal Vergouw (above). “We already do this with our existing mobile networks and from now on we can also offer all business customers with mission- and business-critical processes the right 5G solution on location with KPN Campus. We can also unburden private 5G, so that businesses in the Netherlands can reap the benefits of digitization in an environment that always has to work.” 

Flexible options 

Depending on what the enterprise needs and what level of network management it wants to do itself, KPN can mix-and-match depending on need. For example, the telco already offers public 5G for high-quality indoor coverage. Organisations can now handle extensive mobile data traffic locally through a local 5G gateway – hybrid 5G.  

KPN Campus also lets companies to set up a fully private mobile network. This network can be used for both 4G and 5G equipment and runs autonomously at the customer location. KPN hasn’t detailed its technology partners for Campus although the operator partnered up with Ericsson when it began testing 5G standalone at 3.5 GHz and is currently introducing it in its network this year. KPN also has 700MHz which is a lot better for indoor applications.  

Beta testing Campus 

In January, KPN revealed it was testing its 5G Edge technology at logistics service provider KLG Europe, where it installed an on-premises local 5G gateway. Several automated guided vehicles (AGVs) operate in the KLG Europe distribution centre to collect and distribute packages and pallets. These AGVs are equipped with SIM cards and connected to the 5G indoor network in the warehouse. By installing a local 5G gateway, all mobile data from the AGVs is routed directly to the AGV server at the same location. This improved the latency to only four milliseconds, where approximately 21 milliseconds is currently still common. All the processed data remains onsite as well making it a proper edge service.  

KPN emphasised Campus will give large business customers more autonomy and provides the highest possible availability guarantees. For example, the network capacity can be fully allocated to certain mission-critical applications, such as controlling autonomous vehicles and robots or augmented reality applications.  

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