All Tech News

Work on the Senegal Horn of Africa Regional Express (SHARE) cable is under way. Huawei Marine Networks (HMN), a provider of a submarine-network solutions this week announced the start of work on the SHARE cable, which will extend from West Africa far into the Atlantic Ocean.

Another tie-up between a mobile operator – in this case Safaricom – and a major digital payments company may not be much of a surprise, but it certainly confirms a growing interest from major names across the cashless payment sector in Africa’s mobile money market.

Quetzal-1 – Guatemala’s first satellite – has been deployed. The Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) saw their satellite deployed by JAXA from the International Space Station (ISS) this week.

OPT New Caledonia (OPT-NC), the main provider of telecommunications in the French overseas territory located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, has selected Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to construct and install the Gondwana-2 subsea cable linking New Caledonia to Fiji.

Entertainment and video streaming apps are enjoying something of a boost in the Middle East at the moment, not least thanks to a new offering from Etisalat Misr and a surge in usage of Zoom in the UAE.

Thai communications service provider True Corporation has announced that it has selected Ericsson as a 5G radio access network (RAN) vendor as part of its national 5G network.

A new deal between two major names in IT and satellite communications promises to bring a data-and-innovation-led approach to African agricultural development.

Digital Colony Management, the digital infrastructure investment platform of Colony Capital, Inc has announced the establishment of Scala Data Centres, a hyperscale data centre platform headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Vodafone Idea is expanding Open RAN based deployments in India with Mavenir.

Facebook is expanding its Coronavirus Information Centre to 24 more countries in Africa in a bid to deliver news from trusted health authorities.

Bharti Airtel, India’s largest integrated telecommunications company, has selected wireless hauling specialist Ceragon to help it enable additional 4G network expansion.

Following our recent listing of countries delaying spectrum auctions during the coronavirus, news has reached us of an actual rollout going ahead in Colombia, despite the pandemic.

Oman’s regulator has unveiled an initiative aimed at connecting over 500 remote communities and villages in the Sultanate.

Loon, a subsidiary of Alphabet that takes internet connectivity to the skies in a fleet of balloons, has announced that more of its balloons have been approved to fly in Kenya.

The Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), an agency under the country’s ministry of communications, has selected OpenRAN provider Parallel Wireless to provide mobile telephony connectivity to underserved and unserved communities in Ghana.

Montenegro is likely to see 5G launches by the end of 2022, with the regulator looking to outline a roadmap this year.

Tigo Tanzania has enabled interoperability between mobile wallet services, allowing customers to send and receive funds from M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN in Uganda and Rwanda, and Airtel in Rwanda.

While many development plans are at a standstill around the world, some telecommunications initiatives are still being unveiled. Hungary, for example, has invited proposals for the funding of its latest superfast internet rollout initiative.

SatADSL and YahClick have partnered to expand connectivity across Sub-Saharan Africa.

India’s handset manufacturers are facing an even more uncertain time since the Ministry of Home Affairs’ decision last weekend that non-essentials cannot be sold online during the nationwide lockdown. ‘Non-essentials’ in this case includes smartphones.

Yemen’s Al Kuraimi Islamic Bank is replacing its legacy IT systems with a single cloud-native, cloud-agnostic digital banking platform from Temenos to underpin its banking operations.

Nanosatellite manufacturer and mission integrator NanoAvionics, together with the Mexican Space Agency (AEM), is planning to introduce a nanosatellite pilot project for future space missions.

Turkcell, the leading mobile network operator in Turkey with around 34 million subscribers, has selected Mavenir, a cloud-native network software provider, to deploy its cloud-native, network functions virtualization (NFV)-based IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) solution.

Recent media reports indicate that Google has plans for a submarine cable connecting India and Italy via Israel. The cable will reach Israel in 2022.

Zimbabwe’s second-biggest operator, the state-owned service provider NetOne, is expecting a rise in subscriber numbers after the announcement of a recent government initiative.

3 Indonesia has deployed Nokia’s 3G-4G dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) technology in its live network infrastructure to dynamically extend its 4G bandwidth when the demand for 3G subsides.

Indonesia’s new Nusantara Dua (Palapa N1) satellite did not enter its allocated orbital slot on schedule and has reportedly been destroyed.

After yesterday’s reports of continued cable repair delays near Vietnam, some better news comes from Malaysia, where Telekom Malaysia has quickly restored international capacity lost due to a submarine cable fault.