UK ISP Home Telecom, which is a subsidiary of the wider Telecom Acquisitions (TAL) group (TalkTalk holds a controlling stake in them), has today announced two further interesting acquisitions by welcoming customers from local operators Bloomtel and OpenFibre to the business – all for an undisclosed sum. Open Fibre is currently focused on serving customers […]

The NGMN Alliance (Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance), which is an open forum founded by mobile operators from across the world (e.g. BT, Vodafone, Tele2 etc.), has today taken a more “proactive” stance on influencing the development of future 6G mobile broadband tech by pushing for a more “graceful evolution“. At present it’s fairly normal […]

News

The ship is set to replace a vessel that has been in service since 1983 

Orange Marine, the subsidiary of French telco group Orange that specialises in submarine cable operations, is launching a new ship dedicated to the maintenance and repair of critical subsea cables.  

The ship, named the ‘Sophie Germain’, is 100 metres in length and includes a 450 kW ROV (remotely operated vehicle) that is used to cut, inspect, and bury the fibre optic cable that is stored on board. 

Orange claim that their new “state-of-the-art” ship will bring a “new era of sustainability in the subsea cable and broader network industry”, using less fuel than previous models I and emitting 20% less carbon dioxide and82% less nitrogen oxide. 

“It is with great pride that we inaugurate today the Sophie Germain, a new generation cable ship,” said Christel Heydemann, CEO of Orange, in a press release. 

“Through this launch, the Orange group reaffirms its central role in the laying and maintenance of submarine cables, a little-known industry and yet an essential base for the development of connectivity around the world. At the cutting-edge of technology and thanks to a reduced environmental footprint, the Sophie Germain contributes to the Group’s sustainable innovation approach to respond to the major challenges of our time.” 

Orange is a major player in the subsea cable industry, with its ships having installed 257,000 km of submarine fibre optic cables and made over 800 repairs, as of the end of 2023. 

The launch of new cable ships in the subsea industry is a rarity. There are only around 60 cable ships in the world designed for the deployment and maintenance of subsea cables. 

There were only five new vessels launched since 2004, and 19 of the ships currently in use are over 30 years old. New ships can often cost over $100 million to develop, with many operators choosing to repurpose older vessels to save costs. 

Before the deployment of the ‘Sophie Germain’, Orange Marine’s last new ship was the Pierre de Fermat in 2014.

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Also in the news:
Vodafone’s Andrea Dona: The UK has fallen behind on 5G, but not lost the race
Zegona in talks to buy Vodafone Spain
Connected Britain 2023: the award winners  

 

PRESS RELEASE

TM Forum’s annual Digital Transformation World (DTW) is a major event in the communications industry, where innovation comes to life, inspiration is sparked, connections are made, and knowledge is gained. Around 3500+ attendees, 50+ CSP VPs, and above from 100+ countries joined this event. Network automation is a hot topic and it is one of the 5 main tracks during this exhibition.

As the front runner of this digital era from the African continent, MTN shows its impressive influence in this industry. Mr. Mohamed Salah, Head of Network Operation and Transformation joined the release of TM Forum Autonomous Networks white paper 5.0 (Autonomous Networks: Empowering digital transformation – evolving from Level 2/3 towards Level 4 (IG1326)) as a contributor.

Figure 1: TM Forum Autonomous Networks white paper 5.0 release

After the white paper release, he also delivered a keynote speech titled “Leading Africa’s Progress of Autonomous Network” at the Autonomous Networks summit in DTW 2023.

Figure 2: Mr. Mohamed Salah, Head of Network Operation and Transformation, MTN Group

Strategy

MTN, the largest mobile network operator in Africa, provides voice, data, fintech, digital, enterprise, wholesale, and API services to more than 290 million customers in 19 markets.

During the speech, Mr. Mohamed Salah provided insights into MTN’s company strategy “Ambition 2025” and the technical strategy “PACE” (Platform, Agile, Connectivity, and Experience) which anchors to accelerating the PACE of Ambition 2025.

Within PACE, value-based automation is one of the most important pillars, and it is charged with the adaptation of autonomous networks into MTN’s network.

Strategy to Implementation Approach

From 2021, MTN has embarked on its journey to the Autonomous Networks. In 2023, MTN passed through the milestones of consensus & standardization and started to focus on commercial promotion. “For autonomous network implementation, we have a clear understanding that value-based automation is the key.”, introduced by Mr. Mohamed Salah.

A 3-D model of Service, Network, and Value Stream is used to select the value scenario, where service refers to service experience and service type (ToB/ToC/ToH/…), Network refers to the infrastructure (transport, IP, RAN, etc.) and Value Stream mainly refer to the operation flow. After the certain scenario passed the value scenario selection, it entered the 4-step iteration loop of the autonomous network level including assessment, Gap analysis, Solution Design, and Implementation to promote the autonomous network level of each scenario.

Achievements

Up until 2023, MTN has implemented 21 autonomous network use cases in 5 OpCos. During the presentation, Mr. Mohamed Salah also introduced some of their cases cooperated with Huawei.

Intelligent load shedding management: South Africa is facing a power supply issue and suffering load shedding daily. In 2023, there were 1176 hours of total power outage up to week 29, which had a big effect on the network availability and customer satisfaction. Proactive management was implemented to address this challenge. With the load shedding plan from the power supplier and the network data such as traffic, and site location as input, the same make intelligent scheduling to for battery replacement, mobile generator deployment, and fuel refilling. The work orders are dispatched automatically to close timely in advance to avoid site outages.

After the system was implemented, the network availability improved by 4% compared with before.

Best experience mobile backhaul: NPS (Net Promoter Score) is important to MTN, to support this goal, a best experience mobile backhaul network is mandatory. Traffic engineering to avoid network congestion used to be a time-consuming and highly required workload. MTN implemented a network digital map to have real-time awareness of the network resource status information such as pack lost rate (PLR), site availability, link availability, etc. The dynamic paths are calculated and the traffic optimization engineering is carried out automatically. After this autonomous network use case was implemented, more than 12k times of automatic traffic engineering was done by the system, and network traffic increased by 15%. This automatic traffic engineering effectively avoids user traffic suppression caused by network congestion and provides important support for the network NPS.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Mohamed Salah shared the MTN autonomous network framework blueprint (2023) with the whole industry as a reference for all the attendees to know MTN’s strategy and practices in Autonomous Networks.

 

Transport for London (TfL) – in partnership with Boldyn Networks – today confirmed that Euston station on the Charing Cross branch platforms has today become the latest place on the London Underground to go live with 4G and 5G mobile (mobile broadband) cover, which customers of EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK will benefit from. […]

Broadband ISP Virgin Media O2 Business UK (VMO2) has today announced that they’re including F-Secure’s internet security solution in all newly contracted “Voom Fibre Bundle” packages, free of charge for their small business customers. The security suit includes all the usual features, such as protection from online malware (malicious software), banking protection and browsing protection […]

Broadband ISP BT has today published a wider region-by-region UK rollout schedule for their new Internet Protocol (IP) based home phone service, Digital Voice, which covers the remaining regions across England, Wales and Scotland. But not everybody will be happy when it happens. Just to recap. The Digital Voice product was designed to replace BT’s […]

A new study has analysed 5,603 mobile data (mobile broadband) plans from across 237 countries in order to compare the cost of a 1GB (GigaByte) data allowance, which reveals that the United Kingdom slightly improved its rank from 59th in 2022 to 58th in 2023, with an average price of USD $0.62 per GB (down […]

Rural network builder and UK ISP County Broadband (CB), which holds an aspiration to cover 500,000 premises across the East of England with their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network by the end of 2027, appears as if it may soon become the latest network operator to make redundancies. Just to recap. The full fibre provider, […]

News 

The new mandate replaces two current agreements that are set to expire in late 2026 

UAE-based satellite company Al Yah Satellite Communications Company (Yahsat) has announced that its Government Solutions arm, Yahsat Government Solutions, will provide the UAE government with satellite capacity and managed services for the next 17 years, in a deal worth AED 18.7 billion ($5.1 billion). 

Yahsat is a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment company and offers satellite services to over 150 countries globally. 

Under this new deal, Yahsat will provide the government with satellite capacity using their Al Yah 1 and Al Yah 2 satellites, as well as via two new satellites, both due to be launched by 2028. 

Yasat signed a deal with Airbus for the construction of these satellites back in June. 

In addition to the satellite services, the deal also covers operations, maintenance, and technology management services related to the ground segment satellite systems and terminals. 

“This award is a testament to our long-standing relationship with the Government and the quality of service that we provide as we continue to strive to consistently exceed customer expectations,” said Musabbeh Al Kaabi, Yahsat’s chairman, in a statement. 

“By complementing our existing fleet with Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5 next generation satellites, we will be able to serve the government with new cutting-edge solutions that are not currently possible. The performance of the new satellites is expected to significantly surpass current industry capabilities including capacity, coverage and flexibility allowing us to offer a wide range of next generation applications to our end user.” 

Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscriber to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here  

Also in the news:
Vodafone’s Andrea Dona: The UK has fallen behind on 5G, but not lost the race
Zegona in talks to buy Vodafone Spain
Connected Britain 2023: the award winners