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SFR bid revived: Bouygues, Free-Iliad and Orange reopen talks

SFR bid revived: Bouygues, Free-Iliad and Orange reopen talks
France’s three other mobile network operators—Bouygues Telecom, Free-iliad and Orange—have reopened negotiations with Altice to carve up most of SFR, reviving a complex deal that could reshape competition, capex and customer experience across the market. The operators confirmed they are conducting due diligence with Altice after re-engaging in early January 2026, stressing that legal and financial terms remain undecided and that there is no assurance of a transaction. A successful transaction would compress the French market from four to three MNOs, with material consequences for pricing power, 5G/fiber investment, vendor ecosystems and enterprise buyers. Consolidation momentum is building across Europe, evidenced by recent approvals of large transactions with stringent remedies. Altice has been under sustained pressure to reduce debt following restructurings and asset sales.

Ericsson layoffs continue as 5G RAN demand cools

Ericsson layoffs continue as 5G RAN demand cools
CEO Börje Ekholm indicated the company will keep trimming headcount after cutting roughly 5,000 positions over the last year. In Sweden, Ericsson has notified authorities and begun union talks that could affect about 1,600 roles, part of a multi‑year restructuring program. The move follows a 2023 plan to remove around 8,500 jobs worldwide—about 8% of its workforce—with further reductions last year in markets such as Spain and Canada. The rationale remains consistent: reset the cost base, protect profitability, and keep investment firepower for strategic bets amid a slower operator capex cycle.

EU Digital Networks Act: Single Market, Spectrum, Security

EU Digital Networks Act: Single Market, Spectrum, Security
The European Commission’s Digital Networks Act (DNA) is a sweeping proposal to harmonize telecom rules, catalyze next‑generation investment, and turn 27 national markets into a functional single market for connectivity. The DNA is timed to underpin an AI‑driven economy that depends on fiber, 5G/6G, and low‑latency cloud‑edge fabrics spanning borders. Longer licence durations and more flexible sharing are intended to reduce renewal risk and unlock investment in 5G densification and 6G prep. Mandatory national plans to phase out copper between 2030 and 2035 will free OPEX and energy, but require careful migration of regulated wholesale products, vulnerable users, and critical services.

AI networking bottlenecks: Europe vs US | Nokia Report

AI networking bottlenecks: Europe vs US | Nokia Report
Across roughly 2,000 decision-makers in telecom, data center, and large enterprises, a strong majority doubts that existing infrastructure will keep up with AI’s next wave. In the US, most respondents expect network buildouts to lag AI investment and call out near-term priorities such as optimizing bidirectional data flows, expanding fiber capacity, enabling real-time training feedback, and placing low-latency compute closer to users. In Europe, most enterprise leaders say current networks are not ready for broad AI adoption; many already report latency, throughput, and resiliency pain as data demands rise. The common thread is clear: without accelerated modernization, networks risk becoming the bottleneck that constrains AI outcomes.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3: Hybrid MoE + Mamba‑Transformer for Agentic AI

NVIDIA Nemotron 3: Hybrid MoE + Mamba‑Transformer for Agentic AI
As enterprises move from single-model chatbots to collaborative multi-agent systems, the economic and operational burden of reasoning at scale is becoming the dominant constraint. NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 family introduces open models and tools designed to keep multi-agent systems fast, affordable and inspectable. The models use a hybrid latent mixture‑of‑experts design to activate only a fraction of parameters per token, combining it with a Mamba‑Transformer approach optimized for long sequences. Nemotron 3 Nano is a small, roughly 30B‑parameter model that activates up to 3B parameters per token, making it efficient for retrieval, summarization, assistants and software debugging.

Rogers Satellite-to-Mobile: NTN Connectivity for Consumers and IoT

Rogers Satellite-to-Mobile: NTN Connectivity for Consumers and IoT
Rogers Communications has moved from beta to a commercial footprint for satellite-to-mobile in Canada, extending basic connectivity and select apps to consumer smartphones while adding an industrial IoT tier for remote operations. The new Rogers Satellite service enables a curated set of popular apps to work beyond terrestrial coverage, including WhatsApp calling, Google Maps, AccuWeather, X, and CalTopo on most modern smartphones. In parallel, Rogers introduced satellite-to-mobile for IoT businesses, targeting asset tracking along highways and rail, as well as sensor telemetry in forestry, mining, and other resource sectors where terrestrial cellular is sparse.

Ericsson IMS/VoLTE bridges GSM-R for Swiss rail voice

Ericsson IMS/VoLTE bridges GSM-R for Swiss rail voice
Switzerland’s SBB has deployed an Ericsson IMS/VoLTE platform that interworks with legacy GSM-R, delivering Europe’s first live bridge between public 4G voice and mission-critical railway communications. Ericsson and SBB completed a nationwide IMS/VoLTE integration that extends reliable voice communications across Switzerland’s 3,100 km rail network and removes dependency on public 3G roaming for coverage gaps outside GSM-R footprints. The IMS core integrates multi-supplier elements and preserves EIRENE features such as functional numbering, group calls, emergency stop calls, and onboard announcements, ensuring safety-critical behavior is maintained. It also demonstrates that mission-critical requirements can be met over modern IP telephony when engineered with the right interworking, governance, and testing.

Private 5G for Croatia’s Smart Airports | Hrvatski Telekom

Private 5G for Croatia’s Smart Airports | Hrvatski Telekom
Hrvatski Telekom will deploy dedicated private 5G networks at Zagreb, Zadar, and Pula airports under a €5.6 million “NextGen 5G Airports” program co-financed by the European Commission’s CEF Digital initiative. The project was selected in a competitive CEF Digital call focused on 5G and edge for smart communities, with €3.09 million in EU grant funding and the remainder financed by Hrvatski Telekom and partners. The program targets operational efficiency, safety, and a better passenger experience through dedicated, configurable, and SLA-backed wireless infrastructure. Edge computing on or near the airport premises will enable low-latency processing for video, safety systems, and time-sensitive control.

Vodafone boosts power resilience at 10,000+ emergency mobile sites

Vodafone boosts power resilience at 10,000+ emergency mobile sites
Vodafone is accelerating a multi-year resilience programme to keep emergency and critical services online during grid failures, an issue that is moving from rare-event planning to board-level risk management. In response, Vodafone fast-tracked its Enhanced Power initiative to harden more than 10,000 critical mobile access sites across Europe over the next two years, starting in Portugal. The system uses AI to predict outages, throttle non-essential loads, and place selected radio elements into low-energy modes, preserving channels for emergency calls, SMS, and priority users. More than 400 core and backbone facilities in the EU are provisioned with batteries and diesel generators for at least 72 hours of backup or guaranteed refueling within 48 hours.

Skyfora & LMT 5G GNSS Weather Sensor Grid in Latvia

5G GNSS Weather Sensor Grid in Latvia
Skyfora and LMT demonstrated a real-time, kilometer-scale GNSS meteorology grid running on LMT’s 5G network at NATO’s Digital Backbone Experimentation (DiBaX), signaling a new class of “network-as-a-sensor” capability for Europe. At DiBaX in Latvia, LMT’s 5G sites equipped with Skyfora’s Weather Engine streamed continuous atmospheric measurements derived from small, measurable delays in GNSS signals as they traverse humid air. The result was a rapid-update observation grid delivering near real-time insights into the evolution of storms, extreme rainfall, flood risk, and heat stress across large areas, without deploying new physical weather stations.

6G Spectrum: Why Mid-Band Decisions Can’t Wait

6G Spectrum: Why Mid-Band Decisions Can’t Wait
Policy choices over the next two years will set the capacity ceiling for 6G-era services through the 2030s. Mobile traffic is overwhelmingly urban, concentrated in a small fraction of national land areas and rising fastest in very dense zones. The GSMA’s new Vision 2040 analysis concludes these levers will not keep pace with demand growth on their own. The modeling indicates countries will need, on average, 2–3 GHz of total mid-band assigned for mobile by 2035–2040 to meet peak urban demand; higher-demand markets trend toward 2.5–4 GHz. Crucially, about 2 GHz needs to be operational by 2030 to avoid early congestion as 6G arrives.

Ericsson Mobility Report: differentiated 5G connectivity

Ericsson Mobility Report: differentiated 5G connectivity
Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report points to a clear shift: operators are turning 5G capabilities into differentiated, SLA-backed services rather than just selling more data at higher speeds. After years of building coverage and capacity, 5G networks are mature enough to commercialize features like guaranteed latency, uplink boosts, and application-aware prioritization. The catalysts are in place: more 5G Standalone (SA) cores, rising traffic from video creation and immersive apps, and enterprise demand for predictable performance across sites and clouds. The net result is momentum behind premium, differentiated connectivity that can be priced, assured, and exposed to partners.
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