Microfinance firm Barko is entering South Africa’s retail banking market with a new digital bank built on Temenos Transact and powered by The Temenos Banking Cloud.

Will millions of Nigerians lose their mobile phone lines on 31 October? Or will the federal government extend the national identity number / subscriber identity module (NIN-SIM) linkage deadline yet again?

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has revoked the operating licences held by Wi-Tribe after the fixed wireless provider violated the terms of its concessions by failing to maintain services.

Mexico’s Federal Telecommunications Institute (Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, IFT) has submitted new proposals for 5G spectrum to the country’s Senate.

Iraqi internet service provider ScopeSky has tapped Nokia’s Nuage Networks to deploy its Virtualised Network Services (VNS) Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN).

Unifique, Brazil’s seventh-largest ISP in terms of subscribers, has agreed to acquire regional ISP Click SBS, owner of a fibre network in Itapoa, State of Santa Catarina.

Raxio Group, which describes itself as Africa’s premier platform of carrier-neutral, colocation, Tier III data centres, has invested in the first carrier-neutral Tier III data centre in Cote d’Ivoire.

Veon has signed a seven-year agreement with Amdocs to enable innovative digital services for its customers in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. 

Santa Fe province – an area in northeastern Argentina – is to get a massive fibre boost after the government of the country approved the start of the Santa Fe + Conectada programme, which aims to deploy almost 4,000 kilometres of fibre optics.

With network traffic surging, Omantel has deployed Ciena’s coherent optical technology to connect data centres, submarine cable landing stations and telecom exchanges in various regions across Oman.

Africell has confirmed plans for an ambitious expansion of its network in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, received the operating permit from Chilean telecoms regulator the Department of Telecommunications (Subsecretaria de Telecomunicaciones, Subtel) to operate five satellite ground stations, enabling the operator to launch commercial services on a national level.

The new mobile communications entrant in the Angolan market, Africell, says it has taken another major step towards launching services in Angola by opening a data centre in Luanda.

Multilateral development finance institution the African Development Bank has signed a grant agreement for $500,000 with Y’ello Digital Financial Services (YDFS), a fintech subsidiary of operator MTN Nigeria. The grant will be used for a study into economic, religious, and social factors hampering access to finance for women in northern Nigeria.

Etisalat Group, a leading telecom group in emerging markets, and AI and cloud computing company Group 42 have announced plans to merge their data centre businesses.

After suffering a sharp retraction in the number of subscriptions and revenue during 2020 due to the Covid-19 crisis, Peru’s telecom sector managed to stage a small recovery in the first half of 2021. The extent of the decline, however, will take some time to recover from fully.

Bangladesh’s economic resurgence over the last decade took a battering in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The country had been on track to move off the United Nation’s Least Developed Countries list by 2026, however the crisis may have pushed that back a few years.

Iran’s telecom infrastructure has suffered from sanctions in recent years, which prevented the import of equipment and devices and encouraged widespread smuggling, with a consequent loss of tax revenue. To address this, the government introduced a device registration scheme, and bolstered the capacity for domestically manufactured mobile phones.

Yemen continues to provide an exceptionally challenging market for telcos. Civil unrest has caused havoc and devastation across most parts of the country, while the threat of sanctions has also made it a challenging environment in which to operate.

Bahrain continues to develop its telecoms sector in a bid to develop its long-term Economic Vision 2030 strategy. This is a multi-faceted strategy aimed at developing a digital transformation across numerous sectors, including e-government, e-health, e-commerce, and e-banking.

Operator Vodafone Turkey, and wholesale telecoms platform provider Linxa have announced the deployment of Linxa Connect, which, the partners say, enables Vodafone Turkey to bring the automation, control and efficiency of its international and national voice wholesale business to the next level.

Interconnection platform provider Asteroid has announced the deployment of its modern internet exchange point (IXP) within the PAIX cloud-and-carrier neutral data centre in Nairobi, Kenya.

Mobile Telecommunications Company Zain Group, which has presence in eight countries across the Middle East, announced the establishment of ZainTech, a new regional entity that unifies the group's ICT assets to offer comprehensive digital services for enterprise customers in the Middle East.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a leading source of long-term financing for economic, social and institutional development in Latin America and the Caribbean, has approved a $100 million loan for a programme to promote internet access and digitization in Argentina.

Yet another example of the growth of the infrastructure leasing model in the telecommunications world comes from Kenya, where a major name is hoping to interest a number of big local operators in its tower offering.

Telefonica, one of the largest telecommunications service providers in the world, has announced the sale of its El Salvadorean unit.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka has been legally cleared to launch mobile number portability (MNP).

Israel’s Ministry of Communications (MoC) has launched its first tender for the so-called ‘Incentive Areas’ that will likely not be covered by commercial fibre-optic deployments.

More than $73 million is now expected to change hands after the results of the 5G tender in the Dominican Republic were announced.

Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Digital Development has stated that Nur Telecom, which operates as O!, has opted not to acquire a 2300MHz TDD spectrum licence that it won at auction last month.