In a busy week for the payments giant, Mastercard has announced an extended digital identity partnership in Africa and a memorandum of understanding (MoU) relating to a national payments ecosystem in Syria.

Telekom Malaysia’s wholesale business arm, TM Global, announced on Thursday it has completed its fifth cable landing station in Morib, Selangor that can support up to three subsea cable systems, including the upcoming SEA-ME-WE 6.

Vietnam’s mobile money service is reportedly set for a major upgrade from pilot mode to full-fledged service that, among other things, will see transaction caps raised to ten times the current amount.

Subsea cable provider Seacom revealed on Thursday it will build a new subsea cable system, Seacom 2.0, that will provide AI-level capacity across the Indian Ocean Basin, Middle East, Mediterranean, and Southern Europe.

PLDT Enterprise, the corporate arm of Philippines operator PLDT, has in recent days announced not only a remote connectivity initiative but a mixed reality (MR) trial that could benefit remote healthcare.

Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex), a Mexican telecommunications company and a wholly owned subsidiary of telecommunications giant America Movil, with a portfolio that includes fixed line services, broadband internet and submarine cables, says its TMX5 submarine cable has officially launched operations.

Malaysian telco  U Mobile has signed separate deals with Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, both aimed at driving adoption of 5G-Advanced and AI for enterprise use cases.

Malaysian operators, CelcomDigi, Maxis, U Mobile, Telekom Malaysia and YTL Communications have unveiled plans to launch a new federated network service via the GSMA Open Gateway initiative to help online businesses combat fraud and digital identity theft.

NLT Telecom, a Brazilian operator focused in IoT, floLIVE, a provider of connectivity and network services, and TNS, which provides connectivity solutions and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), have announced a partnership to promote the use of eSIMs with the new SGP.32 standard from the operator association the GSMA in the Latin American Internet of Things (IoT) market.

The São Paulo Subway, one of Latin America's largest subway transportation operators, which operates in the most populous city in Brazil, has implemented a new P25 (two-way radio) land mobile radio (LMR) communication system from Motorola Solutions.

The World Bank Group has approved the Digital Zambia Acceleration Project (DZAP), a project that aims to support Zambian government efforts to increase access to, and inclusive use of, the internet and digitally enabled services.

Huawei has launched a three-step "ACT" pathway to enable intelligent transformation for enterprises, with the aim of helping them harness the power of AI, as well as nine new industrial intelligence solutions developed with Huawei’s partners.

Nokia announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with Indian fibre networking services provider Microscan Infocommtech to deploy its optical network solution in Microscan’s DWDM backbone network in Mumbai and Pune to address surging bandwidth demand.

Telecom Egypt says it has established a new point of presence (PoP) in Jordanian Tier III carrier-neutral data centre Aqaba Digital Hub that it says will enhance connectivity across the Middle East for businesses and hyperscalers.

The US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) has agreed to fund a feasibility study for a plan to extend AFR-IX Telecom’s Medusa subsea cable along Africa’s western coastline.

Data sovereignty is, yet again, making headlines, this time with the news that technology company Cassava Technologies has agreed a strategic collaboration with global professional services company Accenture to scale Cassava’s sovereign AI capability across Africa.

Loc8 has reportedly entered Namibia’s 5G arena, aiming to launch its network in Q1 2026 after years of securing telecoms licences for both 4G and 5G spectrum.

Globalstar, a next-generation telecommunications infrastructure and technology provider, together with its wholly owned subsidiary, Globalstar Europe SAS, has announced that the construction process has begun on doubling the size of its existing ground station in Estonia.

A new agreement announced this week between Amazon's Project Kuiper low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network and Kazakhtelecom, the largest telecommunication company in Kazakhstan, aims to bring high-speed satellite internet to communities throughout Kazakhstan.

At last week’s Huawei Connect 2025 event in Shanghai, Yang Chaobin, Huawei's Director of the Board and CEO of the ICT Business Group, officially launched Huawei's new open-access SuperPoD architecture, as well as a new line of SuperPoD-based products, which Yang said will enable the company to collaborate with partners to create a solid computing backbone for all scenarios.

Japan’s SoftBank announced on Monday that it has formed a consortium with Meta, IPS, Telekom Malaysia and XLSmart to develop a new subsea cable system connecting Japan and Singapore, with several other stops in Southeast Asia.

Operator Airtel Chad is reportedly planning a XAF50 billion (about US$90 million) investment plan aimed at improving network quality and expanding digital connectivity across the country.

A scheduled upgrade to its M-Pesa mobile finance service, announced last week by Kenyan operator Safaricom, was successfully completed today. It has been described as the most significant upgrade of the M-Pesa platform since 2015.

Late last week, the Finance and Budgetary Control Committee of the National Assembly of Senegal adopted a bill taxing digital financial services, including mobile money transactions and merchant payments.

Rakuten Symphony has announced a collaboration with Bangladeshi operator Grameenphone to build an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), making it one of the first pilots of the technology in South Asia.

Nokia has signed a contract to modernise Vietnamese operator Viettel’s broadband network in the capital city of Hanoi.

At Huawei Connect 2025 in Shanghai, China, Eric Xu, Huawei’s Deputy Chairman of the Board and Rotating Chairman, gave a keynote speech entitled “Groundbreaking SuperPoD Interconnect: Leading a New Paradigm for AI Infrastructure.”

Equinix announced on Monday it has launched its first International Business Exchange (IBX) AI-ready data centre in Chennai, which it says will support business digitization, resilience and AI development in India.

Indonesian telcos Telkomsel, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and XLSmart officially launched an alliance on Friday that aims to accelerate standardization of security-focused open telco API protocols in Indonesia.

Google has announced plans to construct four new subsea cable connectivity hubs in the north, south, east and west regions of Africa as part of another wave of investment to boost connectivity and AI development across the continent. 

It’s been a busy week for ICT in Zambia with the approval of two new bills for the digital economy, a new strategic plan announced by Zambia's ICT regulator and the awarding of a World Bank grant that reports suggest may be used for digital infrastructure.

Ongoing efforts to make smartphones affordable to more Africans while still ensuring a margin for sellers are continuing. In fact, this week has seen an alliance between Africa’s best-known home-grown electronic marketplace and a financing group to encourage more Kenyans to buy smartphones.

The Iraqi government has announced plans to construct the country’s first data centres in partnership with Nokia.