All Tech News

Vodafone Qatar has signed what is described as a landmark five-year partnership agreement with Microsoft, which, it says, will see the transformation of its network and customer service operations through the deployment of cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure and the suite of artificial intelligence services known as Microsoft Azure OpenAI.

Semiconductor growth in India continues apace, with a number of deals announced in the past few days.

A regular newsmaker in the energy and sustainability news stories on this site is Clear Blue Technologies, and this week the smart power specialist has announced the execution of a Notice of Award agreement with Growth Energy, a company which specialises in the development, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and operation and maintenance (O&M) of clean energy power plants in Africa.

Africa Mobile Networks (AMN) said on Monday that it has connected more than 100 rural base stations in Nigeria to Starlink’s LEO satellite network, which has resulted in a 45% boost in traffic on those sites.

Philippine telco network PLDT and its wireless unit Smart Communications said on Monday they have expanding their partnership with renewable energy producer First Gen to switch six network facilities in Mindanao to 100% renewable energy.

In a rather unusual turn of events, a Kenyan lobby group has apparently filed a lawsuit against operator Safaricom, along with regulator the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), and Kenya’s Competition Authority, demanding that they allow satellite operator Starlink access to the Kenyan market.

Chinese LEO satellite operator Geespace said on Friday it has launched a third batch of satellites for its planned LEOsat constellation that it says now covers 90% of the planet.

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) announced on Friday that it will invest US$3.2 billion to expand its data centre capacity in India by 550MW, nearly tripling its IT load capacity to meet the demands of India’s digital economy over the next five to six years.

Malaysia’s Communications Ministry has instructed the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to stop forcing local ISPs to redirect domain name service (DNS) traffic away from third-party DNS servers.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant has been a highly influential metric in the technology sector for over ten years. As an ostensibly objective analysis of market competitors, the majority of businesses factor it into their decision-making, so its impact on the sector’s competitive landscape is evident.

True Corp said on Thursday its business unit is collaborating with Intel to launch seven new smart healthcare solutions that leverage 5G connectivity and AI to improve diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and patient data management in hospitals and healthcare agencies in Thailand.

Broadband provider Converge ICT Solutions announced on Thursday that the South-East Asia Hainan-Hong Kong Express Cable System (SEA-H2X) subsea cable has officially landed in the Philippines.

Service provider Ooredoo Qatar has announced the successful completion of its trial of Wi-Fi 7 technology. The trial was completed on fibre-to-the-room (FTTR) devices for the first time in the region. The company plans to launch the technology in 2024.

SierraIG, a joint venture (JV) between dense dark fibre infrastructure provider SummitIG and Neutral Networks, a Mexican company focused on providing 100% neutral connectivity to carriers, service providers and operators, plans to establish itself as a pure-play dark fibre infrastructure provider in Mexico.

At the IEEE PIMRC conference held on September 4, 2024, Dr. Tong Wen, Huawei Wireless CTO, presented his views on the development direction of the 6G industry. Titled “The Architectural Framework for A-RAN and A-Core”, Dr. Tong Wen noted “6G will not be a simple upgrade of 5G - it should integrate AI revolution for the past 20 months, so to reshape the wireless industry and take it to the next height.”

Philippine data centre developer and operator A-FLOW – the JV partnership between PAG-owned FLOW Digital Infrastructure and AyalaLand Logistics (ALLHC) – announced on Thursday that it has topped off its first data center in Biñan, Laguna.

Two positive announcements for Nigerian connectivity have made headlines in the past week – one from pan-African operator Airtel Africa’s recently established fibre unit, Telesonic, and one from Hotspot Network Limited, a leading last-mile connectivity and telecom tower operator in Nigeria.

Space X subsidiary Starlink reversed course and agreed to block access to fellow Elon Musk-owned company X (formerly Twitter), to maintain its satellite internet service in Brazil.

In what is claimed to be a first for Europe, service provider Vodafone and Czech power generation conglomerate ČEZ Group have introduced what they say is Europe's first private 5G mobile phone network (MPN) at a nuclear power plant – albeit in pilot form – in Temelin, a municipality and village in the south of the Czech Republic.

The World Health Organization found there is no link between brain and head cancer from use of mobile phones or being situated close to mobile towers.

Guinea's Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and the Digital Economy (MPTEN) reportedly plans to interconnect the country’s national fibre optic network with the network of Côte d'Ivoire in yet another move to boost its international capacity.

China Mobile International (CMI) announced on Tuesday that the PEACE subsea cable running from Singapore to France is now fully activated end to end, adding more open and flexible connectivity between Southeast Asia and Europe.

Malaysian communications service provider Maxis has announced the latest addition to its managed services portfolio by becoming a managed service provider (MSP) for multinational information technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in Malaysia.

Highlighting an increase in natural disasters in the Pacific Region, Digicel Pacific and SES have announced an agreement to bolster Digicel Pacific’s network with SES's service to enable critical communications to be restored quickly in the event of natural disasters. This agreement is an extension of the companies' long-standing partnership.

International money transfer operator Sasai Money Transfer has announced that it has partnered with Airtel Money, the payments division of operator Airtel, to expand what it describes as its revolutionary offer of free remittances to more African markets, this time targeting Uganda.

The Philippines’ Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is reportedly preparing to tender a contract worth just over PHP37 million (around US$652,540) to roll out free wireless internet access services in 67 “roll-on, roll-off” (RoRo) ports across the country.

The government of Mauritius has launched a new scheme under which citizens aged 18 to 25 years are eligible to get free mobile internet services as part of a government drive to prepare the younger generation for the country’s digital future.

Indian telco Bharti Airtel, MediaTek and Nokia announced on Monday they have completed a trial that successfully combined TDD and FDD mid-band spectrum to boost 5G uplink speeds as high as 300 Mbps.

Will Albania soon join the club of 5G-ready countries? Telecoms regulator AKEP has officially opened the competition for the first frequencies to be used for 5G. This will involve five blocks in the 3400-3800MHz frequency band – two of 80MHz and three of 40MHz.

Delivering a satisfying customer experience is essential to any sales process, but the expectations that telecom operators face are higher than most.

LEO satellite operator Starlink has scored another licence in the Pacific Islands to offer services – this one in the Solomon Islands, after two years of discussions with the government.

Google announced on Thursday it will invest US$850 million in its long-planned Terros data centre in Canelones, Uruguay, a month after convincing the government that the facility won’t exacerbate the country’s water shortage due to drought.