News

A new multi-year deal will see Eutelsat’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation support Orange’s terrestrial networks

This week, Orange and Eutelsat have deepened their existing partnership, leveraging the satellite operator’s LEO offerings to support enterprise and government customers, as well as bolstering mobile backhaul.

The deal will combine the satellite network with Orange’s terrestrial networks, aiming to provide seamless connectivity to these customers even in highly remote locations.

“It is of strategic importance for Orange to invest in the unique LEO European solution that provides best in class, resilient, tailored and sovereign digital connectivity services to serve our customers wherever they are located,” said Jean Louis Le Roux, EVP Orange International Networks. “The partnership with Eutelsat for OneWeb services is of vital importance to support their digital transformation.”

Financial details of the deal were not revealed.

Eutelsat operates 35 geostationary satellites and over 600 LEO satellites, having merged with British satellite operator OneWeb in 2023.

Orange first partnered with Eutelsat back in 2020, purchasing capacity on its EUTELSAT KONNECT satellite to cover the entire French territory. Earlier this year, the deal was expanded to cover Orange’s operations in the Middle East and Africa.

Alongside Eutelsat, Orange also has deals with Starlink “in certain geographies, particularly in Africa”, according to CEO Christel Heydemann.

The company is also working to develop its own “sovereign solution” with its satellite subsidiary Nordnet.

In related news, reports this week suggest that Eutelsat is in discussions to raise €1.5 billion in order to further expand its LEO capabilities.

The company has already secured the procurement of 100 new satellites, which are aimed at launch by the end of 2026, but says that a further 340 will be needed to meet its obligations to the EU’s IRIS² project.

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News

The operator group says its AI Tutor is the first of many digital services to be enhanced with its local language AI models

This week, mobile network operator group Veon has announced the launch of its newest GenAI product: an AI Tutor aimed at teaching users the Kazakh language.

Powered by the Kazakh language AI model KazLLM, AI Tutor provides six gamified learning modules focussed on language learning, supported by a GenAI assistant. Additional modules covering other disciplines are planned for the future.

AI Tutor will be available to Beeline Kazakhstan customers via the company’s super-app Janymda, which currently has 4.9 million monthly users.

“AI Tutor makes learning more accessible to speakers of Kazakh and those who would like to learn Kazakh language by turning AI capabilities into a locally relevant product, seamlessly integrated into Beeline Kazakhstan’s leading digital platform Janymda,” explained Kaan Terzioglu, CEO of VEON Group in a press release. “This is exactly what we intended to offer to our customers when we positioned our AI1440 as a tool that augments human capabilities, and we are determined to put similar technologies to the service of millions of users in our frontier markets through our widespread and accessible digital services and solutions.”

Veon has been espousing the benefits of creating local language LLMs for some time now. Beeline Kazakhstan launched its software company QazCode in 2023, with the company quickly put to work co-developing KazLLM alongside the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence at Nazarbayev University, and Astana Hub, with the coordination of the Kazakhstan Ministry of Digital Development. KazLLM was formally launched in December 2024, with Veon saying it would use this resource to create “augmented intelligence tools” to “enhance the daily lives” of its customers in Kazakhstan.

Speaking to Total Telecom in an interview at MWC Barcelona earlier this year, Veon’s Group Chief Digital Operations Officer, Lasha Tabidze, explained the rationale for the creation of KazLLM.

“There is a big misconception around using LLMs that everyone speaks English and can prompt effectively in English. That simply isn’t true,” he explained. “There are thousands of languages in the world, but there are only seven that are fully resourced [with public online data], so these are the ones the big players are fine tuning. Less-resourced languages are not getting the attention they deserve.”

According Tabidze, KazLLM already offers answers “40% more precise” than ChatGPT in the Kazakh language, providing local users with a more nuanced experience.

At a press event this week, Tabidze re-emphasised that Veon was “not in competition with the hyperscalers” when it came to LLM creation, since these tech giants have little incentive to build AI models for relatively small markets.

“It’s a different race, a different game,” he said. “This is about supporting our customers and creating solutions for them in their language.”

“AI can be a great tool to shrink the digital divide. But if we don’t make these tools available in local languages, then we risk making that divide even bigger,” he added.

Of course, there is also a significant commercial upside to developing local language LLMs too – particularly where they face little direct competition from the hyperscalers. Veon has been greatly expanding its range of digital services in recent years, from digital healthcare platforms to ride-hailing apps, all of which can be significantly enhanced by incorporating local language AI models.

“We have 40 million plus users out of our super apps, 37 million plus of our financial services, and 28 million users in Ukraine registered on our Helsi platform,” said Tabidze. “We’re using all the power and knowledge we gathered […] to create augmented intelligence agents and bring it into the hands of people.”

Currently, Veon’s digital services revenue stands at just over 14%. Tabidze says Veon’s goal is to increase this figure to 50%, a goal he thinks is achievable in “3–5 years”.

Finally, in addition to leveraging their LLM for their own digital products, Tabidze says Veon plans to offer its LLM to enterprises on an ‘as a service’ basis.

“KazLLM is a foundational model,” he said. “If a company in Kazakhstan decides that they want to train this model themselves on their data – not just use this as a ready agent, but train it – then that’s where LLM as a service comes into play.”

Veon is currently working on additional LLMs in languages including Uzbek, Begali, Ukrainian, and Urdu. Additional LLMs for minority languages in each of Veon’s operating markets are also being created.

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Also in the news:
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AT&T agrees $5.75 billion deal for Lumen’s consumer fibre assets

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) announced on Tuesday it has formed a partnership with technology solutions provider DWP Technologies to modernize its data centre infrastructure with software-driven enterprise and mid-tier storage platforms from Dell Technologies.

PTCL said its modernisation project aims to upgrade its storage infrastructure to streamline its operations, boost operational efficiency, enhance performance, and ensure scalability to meet the growing data demands of its network.

Among the operational benefits promised by the upgrade include a significant reduction in PTCL’s data centre footprint, along with its power and cooling requirements, leading to lower operational costs and greater energy efficiency, the telco said.

The upgraded infrastructure will also be designed to elevate PTCL’s service delivery and operational effectiveness by incorporating a three-site active-active metro architecture. PTCL said this will enable it to maintain continuous service even during localized disruptions.

PTCL added that its current mission-critical platform and ecosystem that supports PTCL and Ufone4G spanning three sites using enterprise replication services (SRDF) will remain fully supported and maintained throughout the modernisation initiative with no service interruptions.

By modernizing our infrastructure, we are not only enhancing our operational capabilities but also reinforcing our commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions to our enterprise customers,” said Jafar Khalid, group chief technology and information officer for PTCL and Ufone 4G.

Qatar regulator the Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) has announced that it has opened access to more than 4,860 kilometres of government telecom duct infrastructure across Qatar.

This move forms part of CRA’s broader regulatory mandate to optimise the use of national telecom assets, enable licensed service providers to scale their networks more efficiently, and support the delivery of high-quality digital services to homes and businesses.

The CRA says the initiative also reflects CRA’s strategic objective to promote fair and open access to essential telecom infrastructure – reducing duplicate deployments, improving investment efficiency, and accelerating the rollout of next-generation technologies such as fibre to the home (FTTH) and 5G. 

Delivered in collaboration with the country’s Public Works Authority (Ashghal), the infrastructure spans 60 projects and covers over 40,000 residential, commercial, and government premises nationwide. The rollout is governed by a 2014 memorandum of understanding (MoU) between CRA and Ashghal, which formalised planning, construction and transfer protocols.

This isn’t a new concept. In fact it seems that, to date, more than 15,500 premises have been connected via the CRA-managed government telecom duct infrastructure. Operator Ooredoo has utilised 468 kilometres of ducts to serve 2,010 consumers’ premises, while another operator, Vodafone Qatar, has deployed 251 kilometres to connect 1,150 of its consumers.

CRA oversees access to the network through its Duct Management System (DMS), a geographic information systems (GIS)-based digital platform that facilitates real-time capacity visibility, application processing, and coordination for network extensions. This, says CRA, ensures transparency, efficiency, and alignment with national infrastructure policy.

News

Consumers and small businesses will be able send text messages via satellite

Australian telco Telstra has announced the launch of its direct-to-device (D2D) satellite text messaging service through its partnership with SpaceX’s Starlink.

Customers on selected plans and with compatible devices (currently limited to the Samsung Galaxy S25) will be able to use Starlink’s satellite network to send and receive text messages wherever they can see the sky.

Starlink’s low Earth orbit satellite constellation currently covers all of Australia except for the Australian Radio Quiet Zone in Western Australia and remote offshore territories and islands.

For customers with compatible plans and devices, all that is required to access the new satellite service is a simple software update, with Telstra suggesting that all eligible customers will be enrolled in the coming weeks.

Enrolled customers will automatically be connected to the satellite network whenever traditional terrestrial mobile coverage is unavailable.

Telstra first began working with SpaceX to make use of its Starlink constellation for enterprise customers back in 2023. The partnership was expanded to include D2D messaging with Starlink at the start of this year, with extensive testing of the messaging service running over previous months.

For now, Starlink’s D2D service is limited to the text messaging and even that, Telstra warns will be somewhat intermittent in delivery; customers are being warned they may face delays in sending and receiving messages based on factors such as their location and the proximity of the nearest orbital satellite.

“This means customers are likely to find that some messages are sent or received almost instantly, while others may take many minutes or longer,” said Telstra’s Tom Beach on the company website.

In future, Starlink’s D2D services will be expanded to include voice and data services. The number of compatible devices will also increase.

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Also in the news:
SWR deploys Europe’s first ’Rail-5G’ Wi-Fi  
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AT&T agrees $5.75 billion deal for Lumen’s consumer fibre assets

GoTo, described as the largest digital ecosystem in Indonesia, and service provider Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) have announced the launch of a new, enhanced version of Sahabat-AI, an Indonesian large language model launched in mid-November last year.

Launch versions of Sahabat-AI offered a mere eight or nine billion parameters. Now upgraded to 70 billion parameters, Sahabat-AI offers enhanced accuracy, enabling the launch of the new Sahabat-AI chat service, which is built with strong reasoning capabilities, enabling users to ask questions and receive insightful, natural-language responses. It is one of the many use cases made possible by the more powerful model.

More importantly perhaps, the latest model can now operate across five local languages: national language Bahasa Indonesia, as well as Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese and Bataknese, in addition to a number of international languages.

As news service Forbes points out, this development is part of a drive to preserve local culture and dialects amid a global surge in AI development, currently led by models trained in the US and China.

Of course the term ‘local languages’ may imply modest numbers of speakers. However, local languages in Indonesia can boast tens of millions of speakers. This LLM therefore gives the new service access to many rural Indonesians that may not speak English or even Bahasa Indonesia.

There is, inevitably, a digital sovereignty angle to all of this. All data and GPU infrastructure used to serve the model are stored within Indonesian territory or on users’ own servers, ensuring compliance with national data regulations. By localising data storage and processing, its creators argue, Sahabat-AI also opens up new opportunities for the Indonesian government and public sector to build secure, sovereign AI-powered services.

Indeed, the model is optimised to run on locally accessible infrastructure, enabling a broader range of users, from early-stage startups and university labs to large-scale public service institutions, to integrate AI into their workflows.

For developers, the LLM can be freely downloaded, an open access approach that GoTo and IOH say empowers Indonesia’s broader AI ecosystem to build, experiment, and collaborate – encouraging the creation of AI applications tailored to local needs.

Press Release

by Bas Burger, CEO, International, BT

Today, we launch BT International, serving our multinational customers as a dedicated operation within BT Group with its own people, products and platforms.

It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and technology — with AI catalysing change faster than ever. We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.

The way we do this centres on two highly scalable telco platforms designed for the age of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric, with security built in by design. We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most.

From asset-light to platform-rich

We have evolved our ‘asset-light’ strategy for several years, designing our platforms to reflect the trends we see in customer traffic crossing our networks — from data flows to and between the big cloud providers to the emergence of hybrid cloud as a preferred model for many businesses. We see that AI has unpredictable impacts on our customers’ networks — from the lumpy, bulky training workloads of large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI to the low latency demands of conversational AI and augmented reality. These trends are set against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving cyber security threat landscape and a fast-moving regulatory environment.

Telecoms gets its voice back

Our Global Voice platform enables businesses, governments and the people they engage with to communicate with each other effortlessly. We’re already world leading in the global voice services market, managing over 16 billion calls to customer call centres in over 70 countries every year. We’ve migrated these services onto a new SIP-powered, cloud focussed platform enabling voice to be carried across data networks. SIP has been around for a while but the fact that Global Managed Voice is both SIP-powered and cloud-focused means that it’s perfectly poised to unlock the full potential of integrating voice with AI.

Indeed, Gartner predicts that 30 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will offer customer service through only a single, AI-enabled channel by 2028. I believe our Global Voice platform is strongly positioned to enable this, backed by our experts who have delivered over 5,000 contact centres to over 2,000 customers around the world.

Wrapping the world in Global Fabric

Next, we have Global Fabric, our brand-new, AI-ready, cloud-centric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. This offers customers instant, secure and resilient connectivity to practically every app or digital service they want, including the world’s top cloud and software-as-a-service  (SaaS) providers. It launched to live customer traffic earlier this year and it is the platform that will help us achieve our goal to be the world’s number one provider of secure multi-cloud connectivity.

Global Fabric could have hardly arrived at a better time. We were one of the first telcos off the starting blocks with a truly greenfield international platform to eliminate the drag that the previous generation of networks had on customer innovation. With traditional networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity for a new or existing app, including AI, could take days or weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant.

Now think of the increasingly complex international regulatory environment. Technology and data have become geopolitical pawns. That means customers must double down on sovereignty, ensuring the right data stays within the right jurisdiction while enabling them to unlock its value to the business. With Global Fabric, customers can choose both the cloud destinations their data goes to and the route it takes along the way. This means regulated data never leaves the designated national borders and helps customers stay compliant.

Sharing a platform for success

Looking to the future of our industry, we believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services. We invite other service providers to work with BT International, as we build out our ecosystem of partners, including our recently announced partnership with Google Cloud, and scale fast so we can, as an industry, offer the best value to customers across the globe.

We’re at a pivotal moment as an industry. It is an opportunity to move away from fragmented legacy international networks to a platform designed with the reality of AI, cyber and cloud at its core, reflecting customers’ expectations of speed, security, sustainability, sovereignty and naturally the skills to support future growth and prosperity.

Join us at Connected Britain, 24-25 September in London. Tickets available here  

Also in the news:
SWR deploys Europe’s first ’Rail-5G’ Wi-Fi  
BT accelerates fibre rollout amid cost cuts
AT&T agrees $5.75 billion deal for Lumen’s consumer fibre assets