All Tech News

Technology group Liquid Intelligent Technologies, and South Africa’s Western Cape Government have announced at the Africa Tech Festival 2024 in Cape Town that they have renewed a partnership to continue expanding connectivity in the province.

Industries are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) as a cornerstone for operations and strategy, creating massive real-time data streams and setting high standards for mobile network performance.

State-controlled telco Telecom Egypt said on Monday it has signed several multi-year agreements worth up to EGP30 billion (US$609.5 million) to provide infrastructure services to Vodafone Egypt to support its preparation for rolling out 5G.

Telekom Malaysia’s wholesale arm TM Global said on Monday it will expand its core data centres in Cyberjaya and Johor  to serve growing demand for domestic and international data hosting services.

Globe Telecom president and CEO Ernest Cu said on Monday that unauthorized transactions that affected some GCash wallet users in the Philippines over the weekend were the result of a glitch, and that no funds were lost.

Dubai-based digital assets infrastructure company Hodler Investments and Chinese clean energy company Golden Concord Group (GCL) have agreed to jointly invest in an off-grid energy infrastructure project in Ethiopia to power data centres that support high-demand applications, including artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.

Nokia has announced that South African internet service provider Fibertime will deploy Nokia’s fibre solution to rapidly expand broadband access to underserved regions of South Africa.

Digital ecosystem GoTo Group, along with leading cloud company Tencent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of China’s Alibaba Group, have signed agreements that, they say, will boost cloud infrastructure and digital talent development in Indonesia. All three companies will work closely with the Indonesian government.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison’s ICT arm Lintasarta says it has struck a strategic partnership with Singapore-based AI solutions provider 6Estates to deploy its enterprise AI solutions in Indonesia using Nvidia's AI cloud infrastructure.

Bharti Airtel’s data centre arm Nxtra says it is deploying AI in its data centres to improve operations and power consumption, and also claims to be the first data centre operator in India to do so.

Visa says it is collaborating with QR payment providers across the Asia-Pacific region to kick off a scheme that would enable digital wallet users in the region to make QR payments at merchants when traveling abroad.

Digital infrastructure company Equinix has officially opened what it describes as its state-of-the-art data centre in Salalah, Oman, built in cooperation with integrated telecommunications services provider Omantel.

Fintech company rollout is accelerating in Africa? Why? And will it be sustained? Those are some of the topics addressed by EIB Finance in Africa 2024, a new report from the European Investment Bank.

At the Global Mobile Broadband Forum 2024 (MBBF 2024) in Istanbul, an exclusive ELITE FWA Club Media Roundtable discussed the potential for Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and 5.5G, which is also referred to as 5G-Advanced or 5G-A technologies across the GCC.

Telecom Egypt and Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) announced on Wednesday they have successfully landed the Africa-1 subsea cable system at the first of two planned landing points in Egypt.

Pakistan operator Jazz has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the country’s National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) and the National Information Technology Board (NITB).

Many operators are putting a lot of effort into encouraging recycling – and into being seen to lead that effort, as recent announcements from operators Vodacom in South Africa and du in the UAE indicate.

Latin American IP transit and connectivity provider EdgeUno has announced a new fibre optic route connecting Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires in Argentina.

On Day 2 of the Global MBB Forum 2024, Yang Chaobin, Huawei's Board Member and President of ICT Products and Solutions, opened the keynote speech with the declaration that the mobile AI era is roaring in.

Global payment infrastructure provider Thunes said on Tuesday it has expanded its collaboration with Philippine mobile payments platform GCash to enables users to top up their wallet balances directly within the app using funds from UK and European bank accounts.

Following this week’s news that GDS International received approval to build a hyperscale data centre in Thailand, GDS officially announced on Tuesday it will invest up to US$1 billion over the next five years in the project, and has signed a partnership deal with real estate developer Amata for the site in Chonburi.

Ericsson announced on Tuesday it has completed the expansion and modernisation of MTN Rwanda’s network in Kigali to extend coverage and make the network ready for 5G rollouts in the future.

Funke Opeke, founder and CEO of Nigerian internet connectivity giant MainOne, has stepped down from her role after 14 years – two years after digital infrastructure business Equinix bought her company, albeit news reports indicate that the completion of MainOne’s full integration with Equinix, was more recent, taking place this month.

Sri Lankan operator Dialog Axiata has claimed a first: the deployment of the world’s first commercial virtual base station controller (vBSC) with Ericsson.

Thailand’s Board of Investment (BOI) says it has approved 66.2 billion baht (US$1.96 billion) worth of investments for new data centre projects in Chonburi Province backed by Google and China’s GDS.

Mastercard announced on Tuesday it has launched Mastercard Pay Local, a new global service that enables digital wallet users in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa to pay locally when they travel.

Saudi Arabian telco Mobily and Telecom Egypt announced on Monday that they have signed a cooperation deal to land the first subsea cable directly linking Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

While Nigerian plans to open up the market to many new MVNOs are not necessarily guaranteed success, they have certainly been good for Wireless Technology Labs (WTL), which recently announced that it had been chosen by MobileCoreX Ltd (MCX), a Nigerian mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE), to spearhead the development of the country’s first mobile virtual network.

Global digital operator Veon said on Friday that its unit Beeline Uzbekistan has developed and launched an AI-powered super app called Hambi for all mobile users in the country.  

Malaysian operator U Mobile has won the rights to implement Malaysia’s second 5G network to compete with original 5G operator Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), leaving rival contenders CelcomDigi and Maxis to rethink their 5G plans.

The Day One Keynote session at MBBF 2024 emphasised that we are entering a new era of AI facilitated by the expansion of 5.5G. With 5.5G expanding the boundaries of connections, AI allows them to connect intelligently.

Nokia has announced that Vietnam’s largest service provider, Viettel, will use its optical transport solution to cost-effectively address growing demand for 5G and data centre interconnect (DCI), consumer data consumption, and cross-border connectivity.