Eurobites: Nokia shifts Ooredoo’s Algerian core to the cloud | Light Reading

27 Jan Eurobites: Nokia shifts Ooredoo’s Algerian core to the cloud | Light Reading

Also in today’s EMEA regional roundup: terabit interfaces trialed; BT’s recruitment drive continues; Wind Tre goes with Amdocs for 5G billing.

Ooredoo Algeria is moving its core network to the cloud with the help of Nokia as it readies itself for delivering new digital services. The operator is banking on cloud-driven automation delivering increased operational efficiency, particularly in application areas such as the Internet of Things.

Closer to home, Nokia is conducting trials with Finnish operator Elisa of 1TB (terabit) interfaces powered by Nokia’s FP4 chipset. According to Nokia, terabit links offer a tenfold boost in capacity and simplify operations by avoiding the need to distribute terabit flows on high-capacity routes over multiple lower-rate interfaces in link aggregation groups.

BT says it plans to recruit 428 additional workers in its September 2021 intake, 199 of them university graduate positions and the rest apprentice roles. Slots will be filled in a range of areas, including engineering, customer service and cybersecurity. The operator has recruited more than 1,600 apprentices and graduates over the past 24 months. (See BT still stands for bloated telecom and BT looks more bloated than ever.)

Bahrain’s national broadband network, BNET, has chosen UK startup Arrow Labs to manage its field service operations. Arrow Labs will deploy its core product, MIMS, an enterprise SaaS offering running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Ekinops, the France-based optical transport specialist, has been awarded a grant of more than 560,000 (US$678,000) by the Brittany Region to support EMBRACE (Efficient Multi-Band netwoRk Architecture and Components for Petabit/s Elastic networks!!!), a collaborative European initiative led by Orange that is seeking to improve the efficiency of multi-band optical network architecture. The participants are hoping for innovations that will allow the transport of more than 100 Tbit/s over hundreds of kilometers on a single fiber.

Italian operator Wind Tre has chosen Amdocs’ cloud-based Optima software to take care of its 5G billing needs.

Telecom Italia is now offering the Discovery+ streaming service on its TIMvision TV service. The agreement includes fare from Eurosport as well as various “real life” (translation: not real life) entertainment channels.

BT Wholesale, Cisco and Gamma have together produced a report that suggests the ongoing pandemic has not dimmed the passion for digital transformation and may indeed have intensified it, with 96% of respondents saying that their customers are now taking a more strategic approach to digital investments. The increasing reliance on technology for glitch-free homeworking seems to have produced a mood of cautious optimism among those in the industry.

Prepaid’s not dead: Swisscom has introduced a flat-rate prepaid mobile package offering 30 days of unlimited Internet access and unlimited SMS/MMS within Switzerland for 5 Swiss francs ($5.62).

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading