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The UK government-owned National Highways organisation, which operates, maintains and improves motorways and major A roads in England (they also set related UK standards), appears to have begun the process of hunting for a new supplier to manage the roadside National Roads Telecommunications Services (NRTS) network. The estimated contract value is £650m. The NRTS project […]

News 

The generative AI platform was originally developed for the use of Deutsche Telekom employees, but after successful trials, was added to its external portfolio 

Deutsche Telekom has this week signed up UKA Group, a manufacturer and operator of renewable energy farms, as the first customer for its new Business GPT generative AI platform. 

Deutsche Telekom explained that by using their generative AI tool, companies can increase efficiency and productivity in their workforces, through reducing the effort expended for repetitive tasks and speeding up their workflows.  

The solution is tested for IT security and data protection and hosted on Telekom’s cloud environments, with the client company able to integrate their own internal documentation. 

Though the press release was relatively vague in explaining Business GPT’s specific uses for UKA, explaining only that “the multilingual tool is particularly useful for efficient research and information procurement in day-to-day work as well as content creation.” 

Business GPT was originally developed for the German operator’s own employees and how since been adapted for enterprise us.  

In future, “it will be possible to connect company applications directly via programming interfaces.” 

“Business GPT makes us absolute pioneers. With this tool, we enable our employees worldwide to test use cases for AI language models in a secure environment and use them profitably. That’s what I call real innovation!” says Christian Schmidt, Head of IT and Digital at UKA in a press release. 

Catch Deutsche Telekom at next year’s Connected Germany – get your tickets now!

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT 

News 

The campus is set to put Taiwan on the map as a global data centre player 

Colorado-based Vantage Data Centers, a global provider of large-scale data centre campuses, has announced that is has secured a $64 million loan from two Taiwanese banks (CTBC Bank and Cathay United Bank) to support the development of its first data centre in Taipei, Taiwan. 

The announcement marks the first financing deal for a hyperscale data centre in Taiwan and is Vantage’s first collaboration with Cathay United and its third transaction with CTBC globally.  

The company’s Taiwan data centre campus was initially announced in December last year, and is currently under development, expecting to open in the summer. The campus will offer 16MW of IT capacity across a 215,000 square foot facility, catering to hyperscalers, cloud providers, and large enterprises, contributing to Taiwan’s emergence as a significant digital infrastructure hub in the region. 

“Vantage is proud to lead the way in marking the first financing of a greenfield data centre project in Taiwan,” said Joel Cheah, Vantage’s CFO in the Asia-Pacific region in a press release. “We appreciate CTBC Bank’s continued confidence in Vantage’s data centre platform and are pleased to have the Cathay United Bank team join us in this innovative financial milestone in the next phase of Taiwan’s growth as a regional data centre market.” 

According to Vantage, the Taipei data centre market is expected to more than double from $1.42 billion in 2022 to $3.21 billion by 2028, which it says is driven by growing cloud service adoption and demand for AI. 

Throughout 2023, Vantage raised $10 billion in incremental debt and equity to support the growing data centre demand from the world’s largest hyperscalers. 

“In 2023, we entered emerging and high-demand data centre markets to meet the needs of our customers as artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies continue to advance,” said Sureel Choksi, president and CEO of Vantage Data Centers. 

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

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

Insight

At Mobile World Congress 2024, speakers from Kingfisher, CCS Insight, Vodafone, Samsung, and Telefonica sat down to discuss strategies focussed on changing consumer mindsets with regard to device lifecycles

Sustainability was, as ever, a major focus at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, will operators and vendors alike keen to show off their green credentials when it came to energy usage and carbon emissions.

However, it was a perhaps less headline-grabbing – but no less important – element of sustainability that was the topic of an insightful panel discussion on day three of the conference, seeking answers to the crucial question: what should we do about the billions of mobile devices that are discarded every year?

A circular approach to the device lifecycle

The scale of the issue at hand should not be underestimated. According to the GSMA, over 5.3 billion devices ended up in drawers or landfills in 2023. At the same time, each time a new smartphone is manufactured, around 80kgs of carbon is introduced into the atmosphere.

This unsustainable cycle clearly needs to change, but to do so requires not only buy-in from the entire mobile ecosystem but also changing the mindset of customers.

For Kingfisher, a company that works with partners to help facilitate second lives (and beyond) for devices, the key lies in making trade-in programmes more flexible.

“We allow customers the opportunity to return and upgrade their device at any time, in any condition, for any reason,” explained Georgiann Reigel, CEO of Kingfisher. “The benefit of that is obviously that device has now been handed back in, so we’re able to take that phone get it back to a good condition through repair or refurbishment, and then get that device back out to another customer and begin a second life.”

This represents a fundamental shift from the typical customer journey, where a customer buys a phone and is trapped with it until the end of their contract, regardless of whether it becomes damaged, or a more desirable device becomes available.

Indeed, building this concept of device trade-in into the very first steps of the customer journey is one of the main drivers for the World Phone Amnesty initiative, which aims to see 100% of devices returned, repaired, repurposed, or recycled.

“It’s a very simple concept: when you get a new phone, hand in your old phone,” said Reigel, noting that circularity rates are only at 5–10% on global scale. “We need to push for a 1:1 trade-in rate to make the industry truly sustainable and we’re a long way from that right now.”

Changing the consumer mindset

Of course, while customers are increasingly aware of the environmental impact of their activities as a consumer, incentivising people to make more sustainable choices remains a challenge.

“The core hook for all of this of course comes from the planet and the sustainability agenda, but I think ultimately customers want value as well,” said Varun Krishnan, Managing Director – FinTech & Connected Devices Tech at Vodafone. “This ecosystem around trade-in, financing, and extending device lifetimes actually gives a lot of value back to customers.”

Vodafone itself has introduced more flexible 36-month contracts, helping to extend the life of purchased devices beyond the norm. In addition, Krishnan noted that Vodafone’s global footprint also plays a role in repurposing these devices; a returned three-year old device may not be particularly attractive to a customer in the European market, but in less developed markets like Africa these devices can still be a major upgrade for consumers.

Meanwhile, Daniel Hernandez Ortega, SVP Devices & Consumer IoT at Telefónica, emphasised the importance of creating new ways to communicate the impact of device decisions to customers.

“We want to emphasise the use of the devices in a more responsible way,” said Ortega “We’ve launched very innovative solutions based on blockchain, Web3, and tokenomics, dealing with how people can compensate their carbon footprint.”

In Spain, for example, Telefonica’s Living Apps help the customer track the carbon emissions from their device activity, allowing them to make more sustainable decisions. They also reward the customer with tokens for making these sustainable decisions, which can then be spent to support local or international sustainability programmes that the consumer is particularly passionate about.

Both of these approaches encourage customers to think, at the point of purchase, about what will happen to their device when they no longer need it.

Push and pull: New technology versus longer device lifecycles

At the core of this discussion around device sustainability is something of a paradox. Operators and device manufacturers, naturally, want customer to upgrade to the latest models so that they can take advantage of the latest services. On the other hand, a more sustainable device lifecycle would see customers stick with their existing devices for increasingly longer periods of time. How do you reconcile these seemingly disparate drivers?

For Reigel, the solution lies in making the latest devices more affordable, a quality that will seem move on to their secondary and tertiary lives more quickly. Currently, devices being returned are three- to four-years old in typical exchange programmes. By contrast, Kingfisher’s programme in Australia, which has been running for three and a half years, is seeing one- and two-year-old devices returning to market.

“These are 4G and 5G devices, helping them meet the demand that the second-hand market has,” explained Reigel. “We’ve seen a 15x increase in the rate of returned devices by having a flexible ownership programme in the market […] We’ve seen the success of that programme without even telling people this is green, this is sustainable – we didn’t even communicate that. Customers were just 15x more likely to bring in that phone. If we can take that and scale it around the world, we’re going to be in a much better place.”

“It’s actually the supply that’s the challenge,” she added. “The demand globally dramatically outstrips demand.”

You can view the full panel session on the Kingfisher YouTube channel from the link below.

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

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

Press Release

Nokia has announced it is working with Industrial Partner Siemens Mobility to deliver an IP/MPLS backbone communications network and cybersecurity solution for the new metro railway network in Sydney, Australia. The new Sydney Metro – Western Sydney Airport line will become the transport spine for Greater Western Sydney, connecting communities and travelers with the new Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport and the growing region.

The Nokia mission-critical communication network, which includes an IP/MPLS backbone network and data center fabric in conjunction with Nokia NetGuard Cybersecurity solution, will support robust secure applications such as CCTV for passenger safety, train-to-ground communications backhaul for in-station, on-board and trackside applications, along with the associated data center and cloud networking.

In December 2022, the largest ever Public Private Partnership (PPP) contract in New South Wales was awarded to Parklife Metro for the Stations, Systems, Trains, Operations and Maintenance (SSTOM) work package.

The SSTOM project will deliver:

Six new stations from St Marys, Orchard Hills, Luddenham, Airport Business Park, Airport Terminal and the new Aerotropolis
12 new metro trains
A stabling and maintenance facility to be built at Orchard Hills

The complex security, performance and reliability requirements of new digital and legacy rail and passenger communications services will be served by the Nokia mission-critical IP/MPLS network, comprising a comprehensive suite of routers and switches. The Nokia NetGuard Cybersecurity solution will leverage the latest industry standards and technology innovations to ensure sensitive systems and data are protected from emerging threats, through capabilities such as multifactor authentication, automated endpoint detection and response, real-time alerts, and device authentication.

Vijay Singh, Project Director at Siemens, said: “We are pleased to work again with Nokia as we deliver a safe, sustainable transport solution for residents and visitors to Sydney. The new data communications and cybersecurity solution will be vital to support both legacy and new digital passenger and rail communications services.”

Stuart Hendry, Head of Enterprise and Partner Sales for Asia Pacific, Network Infrastructure at Nokia, said: “This exciting project further strengthens a longstanding partnership with Siemens in Australia and around the world. As the threat of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure continues to grow around the globe it is vital that communications networks benefit from the highest level of data security. As such we are pleased to be able to apply both our local knowledge as well as our expertise in delivering secure mission-critical IP/MPLS and data center fabric solutions to provide leading-edge mission-critical network for rail and NetGuard Cybersecurity package that will support reliable operations and the safety of passengers. Working with Siemens Mobility, we can replicate this for other metro rail programs.”

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

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

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