Orange Business Services, the enterprise arm of France Telecom-Orange, has announced the opening of a new local company in Saudi Arabia. Orange Business Arabia will serve customers from a dedicated office in Riyadh and will be led by Mohamad Hesham, who takes the role of general delegate Arabia at the company. The launch of the office is seen as a means of bringing OBS closer to its customer base in the country and supporting the company’s focus on smart cities activity.
Bangladesh’s only international cable, BSCCL, has been upgraded to 85Gbps from 40Gbps but the bandwidth cannot be utilised according to local sources. This is because the backhaul link from the landing station to Dhakar has reportedly not received the necessary upgrades to support the new capacity. Monwar Hossain MD of BSCCL is quoted by local newspaper The Daily Star as saying that capacity on the link will reach 200Gbps by September 2012, but current active capacity on the terrestrial backhaul route only reaches 30Gbps.
Hutchison’s Sri Lankan subsidiary, Hutch Lanka has launched commercial 3G services in Sri Lanka’s Western province, including the capital Colombo. The company is utilising a network based on HSDPA/HSUPA and has promised countrywide coverage, with a total of 1000 base transceiver stations, by July 2012. Hutch is the last of the island’s operators to launch 3G services.
Puerto Rican operator Open Mobile has launched 4G LTE services, claiming to be the only 100% LTE 4G network in the country. The network is, for now, only available in metropolitan areas to customers at a minimum fixed monthly cost of $40 for 5Gb.
German carrier Deutsche Telekom has expanded its domestic LTE network to four more cities. Services are now available in Bonn, Hamburg, Leipzig and Munich. The company launched LTE services in 1000 rural areas in 2010 as an obligation of its licence and expanded coverage to its first urban location, Cologne, in July 2011. Deutsche Telekom eventually plans to extend urban 4G coverage to approximately 100 of Germany’s towns and cities.
OMEA TELECOM-Virgin Mobile and France Telecom-Orange have signed a full MVNO contract in France. The contract will allow OMEA to offer its own core network components and interconnection equipment on France Telecom’s network. Previously OMEA had offered mobile services on the network as a light MVNO using France Telecom’s equipment. The full MVNO contract will become operational in a few months.
Tele2 has selected Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) as its supplier for 4G networks in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Under the contract, NSN will also upgrade and expand Tele2’s GSM and 3G networks and provide its network management system to monitor and optimise Tele2’s networks.
India telecoms infrastructure company PT Tower Bersama is reportedly planning to purchase 2,500 mobile towers from PT Indosat for $406 million. The sum will be paid with $334 million of cash and the remaining $72 million in Bersama shares. The deal is expected to be concluded in May, at which point Bersama may consider the purchase of another 1500 Indosat towers according to Dow Jones Newswires.
UK service provider, BT has expanded its cloud portfolio and extended the footprint of its hosting capabilities with a new suite of services for financial customers. BT Radianz Venue suite offers services including optimal latency between trading venues within the same or different cities, connectivity in 40 non BT hosting centres and management of a client’s server and connectivity infrastructure at venue sites. The suite will initially be deployed in Asia-Pacific, Latam and North America.
OF Networks, the broadband infrastructure arm of OKI Group has delivered a gigabit Ethernet passive optical network solution (GE-PON) to Tanah Datar, West Sumatra, Indonesia with the cooperation of the Telecommunication Technology Committee (TTC). The GE-PON will enable the Tanah Datar LAN to achieve transmission speeds of 1Gbps, and is part of a scheme to resolve the digital divide in rural areas of the country. Tanah Datar Regency is planning to keep working with OF Networks to utilise ICT in the region.
