News

State-lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti SpA (CDP) will reportedly withdraw its bid for ownership of TIM’s network infrastructure unit, leaving the path unopposed for private equity fund KKR

This week, anonymous sources speaking to Bloomberg suggest that CDP is preparing to drop its multi-billion euro bid for TIM’s fibre network.

According to the sources, CDP is unwilling to increase its offer to exceed that of rival bidder KKR, but still remains interested in taking a minority stake in the business, either alone or in partnership.

TIM has been considering spinning off its network infrastructure unit ever since new CEO Pietro Labriola took over the role in January. The move would come as part of a major restructure that would see the company split off its network and service arms into separate businesses, potentially opening them up to external investors.

This news quickly drew the attention of private equity firm KKR, a company that had already demonstrated a significant appetite for TIM’s assets, having presented the company with a rejected takeover offer back in 2021. The private equity firm already owns a 37.5% stake in TIM’s ‘last mile’ network, Fibercop.

As such, KKR first approached TIM with a non-binding offer for a stake in the NetCo in February this year for an undisclosed sum.

However, KKR was not the only potential investor for the nascent NetCo. Within a month of KKR’s offer, state bank CDP announced that it had formed a partnership with Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management to present a counterbid for a stake in the emergent business unit.

This bid was felt to be more likely to appease the new Italian government under Georgia Meloni, which had previous said that the nation’s critical infrastructure should be under state control.

The Italian government has so-called Golden Power rights, which allows it to veto investments from foreign companies in sectors of strategic importance, including defense, energy, and telecoms.

The two competing bids led TIM announce a formal auction for the infrastructure unit and invite the two parties to improve their bids. At the time, TIM described the bids as ‘not yet adequate’.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, CDP’s initial bid valued the NetCo at €19.3 billion, a figure which has since been eclipsed by an increased bid from KKR at €21 billion.

This new bid from KKR includes debt and €2 billion in a performance-based ‘earn-out’, allowing KKR to recoup some of its initial investment if certain financial goals are reached.

It would appear, however, that CDP is unwilling to revise their offer to exceed this latest bid, leaving KKR unchallenged in its approach.

Final bids for the network are expected to take place by June 9.

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Press Release

EllaLink, the high-capacity fibre-optic submarine cable directly connecting Europe with South America, and EXA Infrastructure, the largest dedicated digital infrastructure platform connecting Europe and North America, today announce a unique joint transatlantic service, connecting South America with the heart of Europe’s main business centres.

Customers of both companies will benefit from the latest high capacity direct data route across the Atlantic that joins up with EXA’s extensive European footprint. The 9,120 kilometres route will enable Internet traffic to bypass North America, and it will deliver a 50 per cent increase in network performance between data centres in Brazil, Portugal, and Spain. Once landed, EllaLink’s customers will also benefit from optical connectivity to and from Sines in Portugal, thanks to the direct interconnect with EXA’s extensive pan-European network.

Ellalink’s Brazil to Portugal routes won the Global Carrier Awards’ ‘Best Subsea Project of the Year’ category in 2019 and 2020. According to Nick Collins, CCO at EXA Infrastructure, “The partnership with EllaLink testifies to EXA’s ambition to become the leading data centre to data centre connectivity provider in Europe and beyond. We have committed €39 million of network investments to date in Portugal and Spain and this partnership enables us to interconnect with South America, closing the connectivity gap for companies in this fast-growing, bandwidth-demanding environment.”

Ellalink and EXA are also collaborating on the Olisipo project, a unique cable system connecting the main data centres and all the landing stations in Portugal. This project will reinforce connectivity and improve network infrastructure in Portugal, which is emerging as another key digital hub in southern Europe. “We understand the importance of securing diversity as an alternative to the north transatlantic routes. Combining EllaLink’s low latency network with EXA Infrastructure’s extensive and advanced footprint enhances both our portfolios and the value proposition we can offer to the market. This is a strong partnership for EllaLink, that will significantly benefit our customers” – says Vincent Gatineau, CSMO at EllaLink. “EXA is a leading company in the market with prime assets and robust experience. Our complementary connectivity offer has a compelling potential for customers demanding the highest quality and performance”.

Want to learn more about EXA Infrastructure and EllaLink? Join them in discussion at this year’s live Submarine Networks EMEA event in London

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News

The operator said it will make the job cuts across its international footprint over the coming three years

Today, Vodafone’s new CEO Margherita Della Valle has unveiled a new strategic plan to revitalise the operator group’s finances, including the loss of roughly 11,000 jobs over the next three years.

Announcing that the company’s results had “not been good enough” and acknowledging that “Vodafone must change”, Della Valle said that the company must move to streamline and simplify its operations and generate efficiencies.

“My priorities are customers, simplicity and growth,” said Della Valle. “We will simplify our organisation, cutting out complexity to regain our competitiveness.”

The operator noted a 1.3% drop in full-year earnings to £12.8 billion, missing its own guidance. The company’s performance was particularly poor in the operator’s largest market, Germany, with lacklustre results also recorded in Spain and Italy.

According to Della Valle, growth is expected to remain flat for the business over the coming year.

That Vodafone is looking at major job cuts – around 12% of its roughly 100,000 global staff – in order to reverse its financial fortunes should come as little surprise. Indeed, under previous CEO Nick Read, the company had devised a €1 billion cost-savings plan, saying in November that driving efficiencies, product improvements, and digitisation would naturally engender some job losses.

Since then, the company has already job cuts in various markets, including in Germany and the UK.

Della Valle herself replaced Read as interim CEO in December last year after investors grew increasing vocal about the company’s falling share price. Her position was made permanent last month, having convinced said investors that she was prepared to make the drastic changes necessary to bolster the business.

“It’s a long road back for Vodafone after years on the slide. But the vision of a leaner, simpler and more efficient organization is the right one, and the move to axe thousands of jobs shows Della Valle is not afraid to make difficult decisions,” noted industry analyst Kester Mann for CCS Insight. “The new boss will also be looking to stamp her mark by quickly agreeing a tie-up with Three in the UK after months of discussions, in a move which would be welcomed by investors but scrutinized by regulators.”

Regarding the potential merger of Vodafone UK and Three UK, Della Valle provided little in the way of updates, saying simply that discussions were ongoing and no decision had yet been made.

How is the UK telecoms market changing in 2023? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s live Connected Britain conference

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Press Release 

Truespeed, the independent broadband provider, has reported a storming start to 2023.

The Bath-based full-fibre broadband provider has extended its footprint by 25 per cent in the first five months of the year, now offering ultrafast broadband to 75,000 properties. The figures demonstrate a 364 per cent growth in Truespeed’s network rollout, in comparison to the same period last year.

This year the company has invested an additional £6 million into its home city of Bath, expanding the network to properties in Batheaston, Bathampton and Bathford alongside notable landmarks such as Pulteney Road and Henrietta Park.

Truespeed has also extended its coverage further into rural and semi-urban towns and villages across the region, as part of a £24 million investment in Somerset and Wiltshire. The company’s ultrafast broadband can now also be accessed by 27,500 properties across Frome, Faulkland, Trowbridge, Mark, Woolavington and Walton.

The company has also seen further growth this year, now connecting more than 15,000 customers across the region, an increase of 15 per cent and now employing 270 local team members.

This significant growth has been driven by the company’s investment in full-fibre infrastructure in the region. Truespeed has continued, at pace, to build and own its proprietary network across the region, offering an independent local alternative to the big household-name broadband providers.

The news of the network’s expansion in the early part of 2023 comes as Truespeed is ranked 53 in the ORESA Growth Index, which lists the top 100 fastest growing businesses in the UK.

Hitting these considerable milestones so early in the year puts Truespeed’s rollout on target to meet the company’s ambitions to double its network footprint and customer numbers in 2023.

James Lowther, chief executive, Truespeed, commented: “Since we started in 2014, our focus has been on providing local people with a network they can trust. The South West is one of the UK’s most underserved regions for broadband and we are on a mission to bridge the digital divide and deliver high quality, reliable broadband at affordable pricing to communities across the region.”

Alongside its business growth, Truespeed also connected its 150th community organisation for free last month (April). St Benedict’s Junior School in Glastonbury became the latest recipient of the provider’s ‘free broadband for life’ promise. In just eight years, the company has now connected 40 schools and 110 community hubs, giving more than 5,700 children direct access to full-fibre broadband.

Lowther, added: “For us, while these milestones may sound impressive, our journey is just as much about our commitment to the region and putting customers and communities at the heart of everything we do. We believe this is what differentiates us and is key to our success to date – we are just as much a people business as we are a tech business.”

Truespeed offers broadband packages starting from 150 Mbps and guaranteed speeds as fast as 900 Mbps. The average home internet speed in the UK is less than 60 Mbps3. However full-fibre broadband isn’t just about the speed; as every home has its own fibre connection, the service is more reliable, upload and download speeds are consistent and there’s greater capacity to handle the needs of multiple connected devices using the network simultaneously.

Founded in 2014 to bring ultrafast broadband to rural, semi-urban and suburban areas across the South West, Truespeed has now passed over 75,000 homes across the region all of which are ready for connection, a total investment of £134 million. Local residents and businesses in Glastonbury, Street, Shepton Mallet, Wells, Portishead, Clevedon, Keynsham, Saltford, Midsomer Norton, Radstock, Peasedown, Nailsea, Bradley Stoke, Patchway, Stoke Gifford, Almondsbury, Thornbury, Uphill and Chipping Sodbury can now benefit from full-fibre broadband.

The company also designs bespoke connectivity solutions for large businesses and enterprises requiring ultrafast broadband and industrial-grade resilience. Companies like Thatchers, Yeo Valley and Charlie Bigham’s have chosen Truespeed’s Enterprise broadband for their connectivity and networking needs.

Truespeed Chief Executive Officer, James Lowther, will be speaking at Connected Britain in London this September. To find out more or to get your ticket visit totaltele.com/connectedbritain

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has published a new technical report that could form the basis of a roadmap toward setting standards for the adoption of Space-Division Multiplexing (SDM) transmission into fibre optic broadband cables, which could in turn deliver a big data capacity boost for some future links. Most fibre optic cables tend to […]

Vodafone UK has released their latest quarterly (Q4 FY23) results, which reveals that their fixed line broadband ISP base grew strongly to total 1.223 million customers (up by 65k in the quarter vs 47k in Q3 FY23), while their mobile base also now totals 17.92 million (up by 118k vs 259k in the previous quarter). […]

The latest network build update from alterative broadband ISP Truespeed, which is rolling out a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to homes in the South West of England, has revealed that they’ve now covered 75,000 premises (up from 70k in April 2023) and are continuing to ramp-up. Put another way, Truespeed says they’ve extended […]

News

The landing further cements Sicily as a cornerstone of Mediterranean connectivity, as well being a milestone for Google’s larger Blue–Raman cable project

Italian wholesale connectivity specialist Sparkle has announced that it has landed its BlueMed cable at its data centre in Palermo, Sicily.

This landing completes the BlueMed’s primary Genoa-Golfo Aranci-Pomezia-Palermo Tyrrhenian route, with the system expected to be operational by the end of May.

Further expansion to Bastia in Corsica is expected in autumn this year.

The BlueMed cable comprises four fibre pairs and an initial design capacity of more than 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, helping to further transform Sicily into a digital hub in the centre of the Mediterranean.

Sparkle’s open access Sicily Hub open data centre in Palermo already serves eighteen international cables.

“With the landing of BlueMed in Palermo, we complete the laying of the Tyrrhenian section of one of the most advanced digital infrastructures in the world while reinforcing Sicily’s centrality in the global Internet system,” said Sparkle CEO Enrico Bagnasco. “Thanks to BlueMed, the Sicily Hub in Palermo is set for further expansion and growth, confirming itself as a strategic asset for the country’s digitization and a key hub for data traffic in the Mediterranean region.”

The plan to create BlueMed was first announced back in 2019, with Sparkle aiming to connect their Sicily Hub to a new landing site in Genoa. From there, the system would connect overland to Milan, one of Europe’s busiest data nodes.

Shortly after announcing the creation of this new open landing station in Genoa, however, Google announced they were seeking to create their own submarine cable route across the Med, presenting a plan to incorporate Sparkle’s nascent MedBlue cable into their larger Blue–Raman project.

The Google’s Blue–Raman cable system plans to expand the BlueMed system all the way to Tel Aviv, Israel. From there, the system will travel overland to Aqaba, Jordan, before linking to Raman cable system and continuing its journey through the Red Sea and on to Mumbai, India.

In this way, Google and its partners aim to create a new route for Asian data traffic to travel into Europe.

Blue–Raman will have a total of 16 fibre pairs, four of which will be shared with Sparkle.

The Blue–Raman cable is expected to be ready for service next year.

Sparkle will be participating in this year’s Submarine Networks EMEA event at the end of this month!

On May 31, Sparkle’s VP Product Management Backbone & Infrastructure Solutions Giuseppe Valentino will discuss the development of the latest connectivity hubs in the EMEA region and, on June 1, Sparkle’s EVP Europe, Zvika Caspy, will provide an update on Sparkle’s latest projects.

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News

We caught up with Victoria Lamberth, Chief Revenue Officer at ZenFi Networks, at this year’s Connected America conference to discuss the company’s neutral host model, their mission to connect the unconnected in urban environments, and their recent acquisition by BAI Communications

At this year’s Connected America conference, bridging the digital divide was one of the hottest topics, with discussions spanning the latest technologies to how best to make use of the wealth of public funding becoming available through government initiatives.

Naturally, much of the discussion focussed around extending wireless and fibre networks to rural and hard-to-reach communities, but, as ZenFi’s Victoria Lamberth reminds us, the digital divide is far from a purely rural phenomenon.

“When we hear about the underserved community, we typically think about rural communities,” explained Lamberth. “But people are often surprised to hear that in a place like New York City there are millions of people that are unconnected and under connected. A recent survey by the American Consumer Group has shown that nearly 33% of New Yorkers do not have home and mobile broadband that’s sufficient to serve in the 21st Century.”

ZenFi specialises in providing outdoor connectivity to these urban areas as a neutral host, making use of a variety of different technologies, from fibre to 5G. Indeed, Lamberth notes that the nature of the neutral host business model makes the company well placed to tackle the urban digital divide, since they must address not only needs of their immediate customers, like mobile network operators, but also communities’ long-term requirements.

“The more broadly we can build these infrastructure assets today, the better opportunity we have to serve those markets in future,” said Lamberth.

ZenFi was acquired by BAI Communications last year, bringing them into BAI’s wider portfolio of specialist network infrastructure companies, which includes players focussed on military and transit connectivity. As a result of this varied brand identity, BAI has recently announced its intention to rebrand as Boldyn Networks in June this year, which Lamberth explained will give customers a simpler path to holistic connectivity.

“When we first came together under BAI, we realised that there were all of these competing brands that offered very complementary services to customers. An easier way for our customers to engage with us is under one brand and that brand is Boldyn Networks,” said Lamberth. “The idea behind it is we want to bring this forward-looking, innovative view to the digital infrastructure space, with a long-term focus on digital equity and inclusion. At the end of the day, we’re responsible for connecting our communities globally.”

You can watch our full interview with Victoria Lamberth from the link below.

Want to join telecoms experts from across the US as they tackle the industry’s biggest challenges in connectivity? Get involved in Connected America 2024 today  

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News

The newly formed Zain Omantel International will offer global wholesale services, providing services to Middle Eastern operators, data centres, international carriers, and hyperscalers

Today, Kuwaiti telecoms group Zain and Oman-based Omantel have announced the formation of a new wholesale joint venture (JV), Zain Omantel International (ZOI).

According to a filing, Zain will own 74% of the combined wholesale business, with Omantel owning the remaining 26%.

The new company will manage the international wholesale business for both Zain and Omantel in eight countries, serving over 55 million customers.

Aiming to become a ‘global powerhouse’ in the wholesale market, ZIO will offer end-to-end wholesale communications services to network operators, international carriers, data centres, hyperscalers, content, and cloud providers throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Zain and Omantel suggest that the formation of this joint wholesale business will immediately allow them to reduce operating costs and increase competitiveness across their combined footprint.

“This strategic value-enhancing partnership reflects the next stage of industry collaboration and advancement, and represents another significant milestone of our ‘4Sight’ profitable growth strategy. It also demonstrates our commitment to transforming the business and creating synergies while extending our reach and capabilities to provide the highest quality services to our customers,” explained Bader Al-Kharafi, Zain’s Vice-Chairman and Group CEO. “ZOI is ideally positioned to evolve into a significant international player on the wholesale telecommunications scene that will benefit both Zain and Omantel on financial, commercial and operational levels.”

ZIO will be led by Sohail Qadir, who has served as Omantel’s VP of Wholesale for 13 years and overseen investments in over 20 subsea cables.

Indeed, ZIO will be deeply involved with Zain and Omantel’s ongoing submarine cable projects, such as the Blue-Raman, Africa-1, Jeddah to Marseille (J2M) systems, which are being deployed alongside various consortium partners. These projects will be supported by an extensive terrestrial communications network.

“The region has matured in terms of the scope and consumption of reliable wholesale services, and this strategic partnership in this integral part of the telecommunications business is well-timed to capitalize on global trends. I look forward to leading ZOI in delivering differentiated services to regional and international customers alike, and providing increased value and enhanced customer-experience to all associated stakeholders across our extensive operational footprint,” said Qadir.

How will the creation of this new wholesaler impact the submarine communications landscape of the Middle East? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Submarine Networks EMEA event

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