Mobile connections are critical to closing the digital divide in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, said a GSMA report released Tuesday. GSMA said more than 40% of the population live in rural areas “where mobile connectivity is the primary, and often only, form of internet access.” Countries in the region are undergoing a digital revolution, driven by ambitious government digital transformation initiatives and a general trend towards greater digitalisation, spurred by the pandemic,” the report said. While 45 million people in the region use mobile broadband, another 50 million remain unconnected, GSMA said.

U.K.-based Vodafone will slash 11,000 jobs over the next three years, about 10% of its workforce, the company said Tuesday. “Our performance has not been good enough,” said new CEO Margherita Della Valle: “To consistently deliver, Vodafone must change.”

Germany’s Deutsche Telekom has Huawei gear in its network, including antennas, but doesn’t plan to remove it, CEO Tim Hottges said Thursday on a financial call. “There is no ban here of Huawei, and I even don’t see a ban coming,” he said, noting the security review Germany is performing on all Chinese gear. “What Deutsche Telekom and what the other carriers are doing is that we are just following the law, and we are just following the political guidance on this area,” he said. Hottges emphasized the growth of its majority-owned T-Mobile in the U.S. T-Mobile covers 275 million POPs with its ultra-capacity 5G network, he said: “We are way ahead of our competition, and we will reach 300 million POPs by end of the year.”

Rogers Communications is testing Lynk's supplemental coverage from space capabilities with plans for expanding direct-to-device coverage in 2024 across Canada's most remote areas, Rogers said Wednesday. It said the service will start with texting and expand over time to data and voice.

Workers represented by United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1944, after 16 months of negotiations, approved a new contract with Canadian provider Telus. The agreement covers 6,800 members and includes wage increases each year through March 2027, better job security protections, paid domestic violence leave and other benefits, USW said Friday. “Every improvement won in this contract is the direct result of hearing from Telus workers that they expect better,” said Donna Hokiro, USW Local 1944 president.

Comments are due April 7, replies May 8, on a November Further NPRM on taking next steps to further clamp down on gear from companies on the FCC’s covered list, said a notice for Wednesday’s Federal Register. The notice seeking comment on extending the FCC authorization ban to components of covered equipment and on revoking previous authorizations of covered equipment (see 2211230065). Filings should be made in dockets 21-232 or 21-233. “In seeking comment on component parts, the Commission notes at the outset that it believes that certain component parts produced by entities identified on the Covered List, if included in finished products, could potentially pose an unacceptable national security risk, similar to the security risk posed by the ‘covered’ equipment that the Commission is now prohibiting from authorization,” the notice said.

The European Commission will put the "final nail in the coffin of competition" if its proposed gigabit connectivity recommendation is accepted, said Luc Hindryckx, European Competitive Telecommunications Association director general, in an interview. The recommendation is part of a package of measures unveiled Feb. 23, which also includes a Gigabit Infrastructure Act and a questionnaire on the future of Europe's electronic communications sector (see 2302230001). If approved, Hindryckx said, the recommendation "will irreversibly damage the pro-competitive and pro-consumer principles established in the long-standing European electronic communications framework." Under that framework, national telecom regulatory authorities who find a network operator has significant market power must impose specific rules on them to ensure competition. The EC, however, wants to boost the revenue of ex-monopolies such as Deutsche Telekom and Orange, which continue to dominate national markets, he said. The theory underlining the draft recommendation is that deregulating dominant players and allowing them to increase the wholesale prices they charge alternative telcos would motivate them to invest in very high-capacity networks (VHCN), he said. The proposal, however, ignores that challengers also have incentives to invest and that competition is the main driver of investments in VHCN: The less competition, the less investment. Other concerns, Hindryckx said, are: (1) A recommendation can be adopted quickly because it doesn't require approval by the European Parliament and Council. (2) The draft undemocratically overrules some aspects of the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), legislation that required approval from the Parliament and Council. (3) Increasing wholesale charges will hike retail prices, fueling inflation. The recommendation should seek to harmonize the way regulatory authorities apply the EECC but, as written, it will discourage them from adopting pro-competitive measures to avoid confrontation with the EC, blogged telecom consultant Innocenzo Genna Friday. If in a given market there may be "prospects" of infrastructure competition, the regulator will be forced to let its guard down, he said. That will make access to infrastructure more difficult, with prices no longer cost-oriented. "All of this is referred to as 'flexibility,' a euphemism that actually translates as: no more competition." Big telcos, on the other hand, said the recommendation is too regulation-heavy. Rules for the fiber era should be different from those for the copper era, but the draft "still excessively relies on disproportionate regulatory intervention, as opposed to much needed incentives and cost recovery reflecting the business risk of network deployment," said the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association.

The kind of “digital cooperation” facilitated by the ITU is “needed now more than ever before,” new ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin’s told Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday. “I strongly believe that we can’t separate people from technology,” she said. Bogdan-Martin said it remains unclear whether the world will meet the U.N.’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) (see 1702280042): Under the worst-case scenario, “we fail to rescue the SDGs, development is stalled, or it’s going backwards, the climate crisis has overwhelmed us, and mistrust is rampant in terms of technology. Gender equality is a distant dream, and more and more people actually question the very value of connectivity.” What can we do to challenge the status quo? she asked. Finite resources like spectrum and associated satellite orbits “are the building blocks of our advanced global communications system, for all humanity,” she said. They need to be shared “equitably, responsibly, while avoiding harmful interference.” The world needs to “speak the same language” and “reach consensus on global technology standards,” she said. The ITU vision for 6G for 2030 and beyond will be completed later this year and will make energy efficiency and environmental sustainability part of the technical specifications for the first time, she said. She also supports more partnerships to bring down the cost of connectivity. Bogdan-Martin urged the wireless industry to unite behind the SDGs “because failure is not an option.” She said when she spoke with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres a few weeks ago “he stressed the importance of digital technologies and how ITU can be a pioneer.” There “are risks, and those risks are growing, but I ask, what are the risks if we do nothing?” Bogdan-Martin asked.

A new satellite network will ensure secure communications for EU government bodies, emergency services and EU delegations globally after the European Parliament approved the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite constellation. Europe's first multi-orbital satellite constellation has a budget of 2.4 billion euros ($2.6 billion) and will be operational in 2024. It will "ensure the EU's strategic autonomy in the field of secure government communications, in a context where cyber security threats are becoming increasingly important, especially following Russia's war against Ukraine," Parliament said Tuesday. Its negotiations with governments resulted in stronger environmental and sustainability provisions that reduce space debris proliferation and light pollution and require carbon footprint compensation to offset emissions. The agreement now needs final approval from administrations.

With 6G standards likely to start rolling out around 2025, now is the time for international collaboration on what the technology will look like and what its use cases will be, speakers said at a Tuesday Centre for European Policy Studies webinar on Japan-EU cooperation in 5G/6G and future connectivity. The EU and Japan signed a digital partnership in May and are discussing what they want to accomplish in technological terms in 2024, said Bernard Barani, European Commission DG Connect deputy head future connectivity systems unit. 6G is expected to arrive in the 2030s, said University of Tokyo professor Akihiro Nakao, who chairs Japan's International Committee of Beyond5G Promotion Consortium: In 2025, 3rd Generation Partnership Project standards will begin to embody what 6G will be in the real world. Asked how the two regions will put flesh on the bones of their partnership, Barani said the idea was to exchange views on future systems via structured dialogues, regular meetings at the ITU and as part of the EC's 2024 work program. Nakao said there's a need for industry and government funding and creating an EU-Japan flagship project to spur investment.The EU's 6G Hexa-X flagship program has already defined 23 use cases clustered into five families, Barani said: Robots and cobots; telepresence; massive twinning of the physical and digital worlds; local trust zones; and sustainable development. Japan set out seven directions for technologies it wants to achieve in the 2030s, said Nakao. It first wants to extend 5G capacities to ultra-fast and large capacities, ultra-low latency and ultra-numerous connections, and then add four value-added features for 6G: Ultra-low-power consumption; ultra-security and resilience; autonomy among devices without manual intervention, and scalability via seamless connections over satellites and High-Altitude Platform Stations. Asked whether spectrum for 6G will be an issue, Barani said it will be necessary to move to higher frequency bands for very accurate positioning and sensing. Those bands also provide a huge capacity, which will be needed for digital twinning. International coordination on how to use the high-frequency bands is important, Nakao said. Asked about the security of open radio access from high-risk vendors, he said ORAN is like taking the mobile network to pieces like Lego blocks. Pieces provided by one vendor can easily be replaced by those from another as long as the interfaces are clearly defined. Interoperability testing, however, is a challenge because the network has so many parts. Japan launched a testing center for interoperability security, he said.