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The companies are also reportedly discussing the possibility of forming a $200 million joint venture

Anonymous sources speaking to Reuters suggest that the digital arm of Saudi Arabia oil company Aramco could be preparing to take a minority stake in US telecoms tech firm Mavenir.

The deal, which is not guaranteed to proceed, would see Aramco Digital take a $1 billion stake in the Open RAN specialist, valuing Mavenir at around $3 billion.

Additional funding cannot come soon enough for Mavenir. Last week, a report from Light Reading claimed Mavenir was at risk of defaulting in the face of maturing debts and poor cash flow. Financial analysts from S&P Global, quoted in the article, suggested that Mavenir would be forced to default or restructure if additional funding or an extension of debt maturities could be attained.

Part of the challenge for Mavenir has been the lacklustre adoption rate of Open RAN – a disaggregated, open approach to mobile infrastructure technology of which Mavenir has been a major proponent. Outside of a number of handful of greenfield developments – such as with Dish in the US, Rakuten Mobile in Japan, and 1&1 in Germany – Open RAN technology had gained little traction among major operators.

The global RAN market, which has itself been declining over the past two years, remains dominated by Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei.

That is not to say, however, that the telecoms industry at large has completely given up on Open RAN. Indeed, Aramco Digital itself has already shown significant interest in the technology, having announced the creation of Saudi Arabia’s first Open RAN Development Centre in partnership with Intel at the start of this year.

Aramco Digital, headed by ex-CEO of Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, Tareq Amin, was launched in January 2023 as a part of efforts to diversify the energy company, as well as to align with the Saudi Arabia government’s Vision 2030.

Both the Saudi Arabian government and China-averse President Donald Trump have been significant supporters of Open RAN, potentially offering a more positive environment for the struggling Open RAN market over the coming years.

In addition to taking a minority stake, the report suggests that Aramco Digital is separately discussing the formation of a $200 million joint venture with Mavenir focussed on regional technology development.

Reports suggest the deal could be finalise before the end of the year.

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The new service is powered by technology from California-based cybersecurity company Fortinet  

BT has expanded its secure networking service for UK businesses, introducing new features designed to protect cloud data and applications. The upgrade, powered by cybersecurity company Fortinet, adds increased security to BT’s existing Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) services, making it easier for companies to securely access the cloud and managing their networks effectively. 

The new capabilities include AI-powered Security Service Edge (SSE) features, such as firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateways, and zero-trust network access. These tools ensure that only verified users and devices can access sensitive company resources.  

As businesses increasingly shift to cloud-based operations and support employees working from various locations, these new features provide a solution for keeping data and applications safe. With this expanded service, BT aims to simplify network security and help companies protect themselves against growing cyber threats while maintaining seamless access to cloud services, the company said. 

“Building upon our decade-long partnership, we’re proud to collaborate on the new SASE service with BT to enable its UK customers to converge networking and security,” said Nirav Shah, Vice President, Products and Solutions at Fortinet in a press release.  

“SASE complements the cybersecurity platform approach to delivering integrated security and secure network access regardless of where users are located. By combining Fortinet’s cutting-edge SASE and secure networking solutions with a leading choice of fixed and 5G access networks from BT, customers can have a nimble, robust, and more secure network to help them get the best from the cloud,” he continued. 

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Also in the news:
VMO2 launches UK’s first 5G standalone small cells in Birmingham
BT says Labour’s budget will cost company £100m
Vodafone Spain and Telefonica complete FibreCo deal 

Business UK broadband ISP Commsworld has today announced that they’ve completed the construction of the core network build for a new full fibre infrastructure in Northumberland (England), which is designed to replace the county council’s ageing Wide Area Network (WAN). But local homes, schools and business are also seeing the benefit.

The Edinburgh-based operator, which holds a 20-year strategic partnership with Northumberland County Council (NCC), has deployed 262km of new full-fibre infrastructure that can connect employees in 150 council sites. In addition, the new infrastructure has helped to upgrade connectivity for around 115 Northumberland schools.

The infrastructure is also helping Commsworld’s partner and rural focused ISP, Alncom, which has been working alongside the project by utilising funding from the UK Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) to upgrade broadband for 50,000 properties in harder-to-reach rural areas of the county. “The new infrastructure is already providing benefit and enabling us to focus our build plans where the need is greatest to target areas left out by incumbent operators,” said Alncom’s MD, Stephen Pinchen.

Elsewhere, Commsworld is working alongside the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE) and Community Action Northumberland (CAN), funding a project which will recruit and train volunteer Digital Champions to engage in rural communities to improve digital skills and confidence. NICRE will also be carrying out a three-year study to capture learning and impact of the project.

Craig Scott, Public Sector Director at Commsworld, said:

“We are delighted to have completed the transformation of Northumberland County Council’s WAN as part of our long-term strategic partnership. This delivery, coupled with our future-proofing of connectivity for years to come, has already seen council sites, schools, businesses and communities benefit from this significantly enhanced connectivity.

Commsworld is now looking forward to working with NICRE and CAN to support people in rural Northumberland to get online and get the most out of digital technology. Digital champions will help bring the benefits of significantly improved internet access to people across the county.

As we all – including the council – adopt more digital ways of living and working, we are committed to supporting people to develop the digital skills and confidence they need to reap the rewards and boost their standards of living.”

Cllr Wojciech Ploszaj, Northumberland County Council, said:

“This is great news for our county. The completion of this project will deliver significant benefits to our communities, particularly in rural areas.

This enhanced digital infrastructure will enable us to improve educational resources and support local businesses by providing access to the fastest internet speeds available. This strengthens our commitment to bridging the digital divide, ensuring even the most remote areas are connected.

I would like to thank Commsworld and Alncom for helping us bring these valuable improvements to Northumberland.”

The new network was previously said to be worth £22 million and has been linked to Commsworld’s latest Optical Core Network (OCN), a next generation network in which it invested £10m.

In somewhat of a unique development for the UK and Wales. Transport for Wales (TfW), which is a not-for-profit owned by the Welsh Government, has launched a new “arm’s-length initiative” called TfW Ffeibr (Fibre). This has built a new full fibre broadband network alongside the railways and is offering access to help serve communities in the South Wales valley.

Essentially, while building the South Wales Metro and carrying out huge infrastructure changes to electrify the railway line in the South Wales valleys, TfW also seized the opportunity to, at the same time, install a new full fibre network. The new arms-length commercial subsidiary business was thus set up to help drive the new opportunity forward and realise the potential advantages for TfW and the Welsh economy.

In short, TfW Ffeibr (Fibre) was established to offer internet service providers (ISP) access to the new infrastructure via wholesale. The network itself currently runs through Wales’ Core Valley routes into the Capital City region, connecting some of the hardest-to-reach places in Wales.

The hope is that this will “enable significant inward investment to the region“, as businesses will now be able to enjoy multi-gigabit speeds – potentially attracting everything from data centres, the AI sector, manufacturing, large-scale film and TV production and other industries. It should also “support reducing areas of digital poverty in South Wales and contribute to regional economic development“.

Alexia Course, Chief Commercial Officer at TfW, said:

“We’re extremely proud and excited to be launching TfW Ffeibr today, to provide a state-of-the-art high-speed network for companies to use and sell within valley communities.

We’ve been carrying out huge infrastructure works in the valleys, electrifying the railway line as part of the South Wales Metro and this presented us with an opportunity to also build the infrastructure for a high-speed core network.

The South Wales Metro project is about physically connecting people and TfW Ffeibr is about connecting people in the digital world. At TfW, we’re fully aligned to the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act and this new subsidiary business reinforces our commitment to improving the lives of people in Wales.”

Guy Reiffer, Managing Director at TfW Ffeibr, said:

“This is an industry and UK first – a rail infrastructure project that has diversified and utilised its construction to also install a high-speed, full fibre internet capable network.

We’re excited to launch today and we’re looking forward to working with telecoms companies to provide big-bandwidth full fibre internet for communities that are harder to reach.

For people living in the valleys, high-speed internet enabled by our core fibre offering will open up lifestyle and business opportunities.”

The announcement itself is quite vague, although the operator’s website points to a mix of Dark Fibre and optical wavelength products, which will offer a range of active services with data speeds from 10Gbps and all the way up to 100Gbps (Gigabits per second). The website is currently quite basic and doesn’t include a lot of information, but you can see the route it takes.

A number of network operators are currently building fibre in South Wales, such as Openreach and Ogi, which may well have an interest in this. But quite how much interest will exist is difficult to say, particularly as fibre has already spread across a lot of core routes for such operators and the hard part is often in extending that to individual premises.

News 

Anthropic continues to grow rapidly, having received over $7.3 billion in funding over the past year alone 

AI company Anthropic and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced an expansion of their partnership with a new $4 billion investment from Amazon, bringing its total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion. AWS is now Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner, supporting the development of advanced AI systems. 

Anthropic, which was co-founded by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei in 2021, is partnering up with AWS to improve the latter’s AI training hardware Trainium. The collaboration, according to the partners, will ensure faster, more cost-effective development of AI models by optimising both the hardware and software. 

Another key focus of this partnership is the further development of Anthropic’s AI model, Claude. Amazon currently offers a managed service via AWS called Amazon Bedrock that offers customers a choice of high-performing foundation models – including Anthropic’s Claude – via a single API. Similar offerings from Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI are also included as part of Bedrock.  

The investment is Amazon’s second in Anthropic this year. Back in March, the company injected $2.75 billion into Anthropic, in a bid to compete with AI rivals such as Google and Microsoft through its AI chatbot Claude. 

“Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS in Amazon’s press release in March.  

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Also in the news:
Nokia and Microsoft expand data centre partnership
Openreach’s full fibre rollout to boost economy by £73bn in next decade – report 
FCC launches first review of submarine cable rules since 2001

News 

The ongoing cyber-attack was first reported last month 

A recent espionage attack on US telcos, allegedly linked to the People’s Republic of China. is the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history – by far”, according to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner. 

Investigators believe these hackers may have gained access to confidential data via wiretap requests to telcos from federal agencies.  

The full scope of the breach is still being assessed, with major tech firms like Microsoft and Mandiant supporting the investigation.   

Over the weekend, US senators sat down with telecom executives and federal officials to discuss the attacks. The breach, which has been attributed to a group known as “Salt Typhoon,” exploited weaknesses in systems used for lawful surveillance, potentially exposing sensitive government and private messages. 

The discussions focused on how hackers gained long-term access to these systems, raising questions about whether current security standards are strong enough. Officials stressed the need for telecom companies to strengthen their defenses and improve coordination with the government to stay ahead of these threats. 

“National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger hosted a meeting with executives from the telecommunications sector to share intelligence and discuss the People’s Republic of China’s significant cyber espionage campaign targeting the sector,” read a government statement. 

“The meeting was an opportunity to hear from telecommunications sector executives on how the U.S. Government can partner with and support the private sector on hardening against sophisticated nation state attacks.” 

Names of the attending companies were not disclosed, but it is thought that AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen are among targeted companies. 

The Chinese Embassy in Washington has vehemently denied government involvement in the cyberattacks, calling the accusations “a distortion of fact” and a political attempt to “smear” China. In a new statement released on Friday, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, said that “for quite some time, the US side has been floating all sorts of disinformation about threats of “Chinese hackers” to serve its own geopolitical purposes. China firmly opposes and combats all kinds of cyber attacks.” 

Keep up to date with the latest international telecoms news by subscribing to the Total Telecom daily newsletter 

Also in the news:
Nokia and Microsoft expand data centre partnership
Openreach’s full fibre rollout to boost economy by £73bn in next decade – report 
FCC launches first review of submarine cable rules since 2001

News 

The partnership will expand Nokia’s reach to over 30 countries and strengthen its role in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure

Nokia has extended its agreement with Microsoft for another five years to supply routers and switches for Azure data centres.

The collaboration builds on Nokia’s work with open-source SONiC software, including advancements for high-capacity data centre networks, said the companies in a press release. 

As part of the deal, Nokia will provide its 7250 IXR-10e platform to boost connectivity in Microsoft’s data centres, along with its custom top-of-rack switches used across Azure. Nokia’s technology will support new sites and help Microsoft upgrade existing facilities to handle growing data traffic with improved performance. The deployments are set to begin in February next year. 

Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. 

Vach Kompella, Senior Vice President and General Manager of IP Networks business at Nokia noted how the deal is the “next phase of our relationship with Microsoft” and as a result “Nokia will further increase the scalability and reliability of Microsoft Azure datacenters around the world.” 

“As leaders in the advancement of cloud compute, we are continuously expanding our global footprint to support the massive growth in compute workloads. Over the past six years we have worked with Nokia’s engineers to develop their routers running SONiC to rapidly advance our expansion at the quality our customers demand,” said David Maltz, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure. 

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Also in the news: 

UK ISP LilaConnect, which following the VXFIBER merger is now part of Freedom Fibre‘s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network (here), has launched a special Black Friday promotion that will give new customers on their 1Gbps package in Stoke-on-Trent, Leek, Crewe and Uttoxeter a £100 voucher upon account activation.

In order to access the deal, which will be available until 23:59 on Friday (29th Nov), new customers should sign up to LilaConnect’s 1 Gigabit LilaFibre package (£34.98 per month, 24 months contract) using the promo code ‘LilaBlack’.

Once their installation date is confirmed and the service goes live, the voucher can then be used at well-known household retailers including John Lewis and Marks & Spencer. This can be claimed by filling out the form on the landing page stokebroadband.co.uk/blackfriday , leekbroadband.co.uk/blackfriday or creweebroadband.co.uk/blackfriday.

New research from Broadband Genie has analysed 207,711 internet speed tests in order to identify the top slowest and fastest ten UK streets for broadband. The slowest street was found to be Greenfields Road in Bishop Auckland (average downloads of 0.35Mbps), while the fastest was Tynemouth Street in London (921.76Mbps). But this isn’t the full story.

According to Thinkbroadband’s latest data, some 85.5% of UK premises are currently within reach of a gigabit-capable fixed broadband network (1000Mbps+), which primary reflects the combination of full fibre (FTTP/B) and hybrid fibre coax (HFC) lines. Similarly, some 98.2% of premises should be within reach of a fixed “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) network.

However, the new study, which seems to mirror similar reports from Uswitch, is based on consumer speedtests. One issue here is that such reports don’t accurately reflect the underlying availability of faster networks and are thus more a reflection of consumer take-up (i.e. people on slower networks/packages may weight against those on faster ones).

The report does acknowledge the aforementioned issue and highlights how 9 out of the 10 slowest streets should, in theory, still be able to upgrade to get speeds of at least 30Mbps. Suffice to say, consumer awareness and adoption of faster packages remains a key issue, although this will change over time.

In other cases, consumers may be aware that a faster service exists, but they have simply chosen not to upgrade due to various issues, such as the potentially higher price, lack of support for the new network by their existing ISP, fear of switching, being stuck in a long contract term or a simple lack of need or desire for anything faster.

Speedtest-based studies like this can also be influenced by other factors, such as poor home wiring, the user’s choice of package (e.g. 1Gbps could be available, but people may pick a slower tier), local (home) network congestion and slow WiFi etc.

In short, take these results with a pinch of salt and remember, the slowest streets are the ones that cannot get a viable broadband service and thus won’t appear in these studies. Similarly, the fastest streets are those covered by the handful of providers capable of offering them speeds in the 7-10Gbps range, such as B4RN, Youfibre and a few others.

Table: Slowest 10 streets for UK broadband

Table: Fastest 10 streets for UK broadband

For streets to qualify for the study, postcodes needed to have the following criteria:

• A minimum of three speed tests from three unique IP addresses.

• Speed tests are from a commercial internet service provider.

• The test is from a fixed-line internet connection.

• At least 10 residential properties required at a postcode.

Postcodes were ranked from highest to lowest on a combination of broadband download speed and broadband upload speed, using an 80:20 ratio.

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The report, commissioned by Openreach, is summary of the ‘spatial, employment and social impacts’ of the company’s full fibre rollout 

A new report commissioned by Openreach and produced by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has outlined the value of ultrafast connectivity could deliver to the UK economy by 2034.  

The report forecasts that the rollout of full fibre could add £66 billion a year to the UK economy by 2029, rising to £73 billion by 2034. It attributes this growth to improved productivity and the return of over 620,000 people to the workforce by the end of the current parliament, with numbers climbing to 652,000 by 2034. 

Realising these potential economic gains, however, relies heavily not only on  the technology’s effective delivery, but on its widespread, especially in less connected regions. Recent research from Point Topic suggests that fibre take-up in the UK currently sits at 34.7%, below the European average of 54.4%.  

The report also highlights the shift to remote work, which was accelerated by the pandemic, as a key driver in fibre’s ongoing economic impact. By 2029, it estimates an additional 900,000 people will be working from home compared to 2024, many in rural areas. This could help reverse rural depopulation trends by allowing people to live further from major cities while maintaining their careers. However, delivering reliable broadband to hard-to-reach areas remains a major challenge. 

The environmental benefits of the fibre rollout could also be significant. By 2034, the reduction in commuting is expected to cut over 4 billion kilometres of car travel annually, leading to a reduction of 320,000 tonnes of carbon emissions each year. While these numbers are encouraging, they hinge on widespread adoption of remote work and sustained progress in building digital infrastructure. 

The report also highlights how full fibre could enhance public services. It estimates that the NHS could enable 5 million additional online appointments by 2029, while better broadband access may help thousands of students achieve higher grades.  

Beyond its economic and environmental impacts, Openreach emphasises the social value generated by the rollout. The company estimates that small and medium-sized businesses gain £1.2 billion annually from enhanced connectivity, and it reports over 8,000 hours of staff volunteering in community projects. Openreach has also implemented ethical training for its 16,000 suppliers to strengthen responsible practices.  

The UK’s fibre rollout is a significant infrastructural investment, but it is not without challenges. Ensuring equitable access across regions, maintaining delivery pace, and helping communities adapt to new technologies will all be critical. While the report paints an optimistic picture of what ultrafast broadband could achieve, turning that potential into reality will require close collaboration between government, industry, and local stakeholders. 

Join us at next year’s Connected North 2025 live in Manchester! Discounted tickets are available here 

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