News

AST SpaceMobile and Vodafone have selected Germany as the location for their principal Satellite Operations Centre to serve their satellite joint venture, SatCo

The centre will be responsible for allocating and mapping satellite connectivity used by SatCo to serve mobile network operators across the continent. It will also host one of several ground gateway stations that link the planned satellite constellation to terrestrial 4G and 5G networks.

The site is expected to be near either Munich or Hannover, with the final choice subject to negotiation.

Commercial launches are planned from 2026, and operators in 21 EU member states and other European countries have expressed interest in adopting the service.

Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile first announced their intention to for the SatCo joint venture back in March, with Vodafone chief executive Margherita Della Valle suggesting the company would “deliver a sovereign satellite solution to the whole of Europe”. It is planned to deliver mobile operators throughout Europe a scalable satellite mobile broadband capability to cover underserved areas and provide resilient back-up for public services.

A central feature of the EU-targeted constellation will be a so-called “command switch” providing European oversight and security controls. This capability is described by the partners as supporting the updating of telemetry, tracking and control (TTC) encryption keys for S‑Band, the frequency used for direct-to-handset connectivity, and Q/V‑Band links between satellites and earth stations. It will also allow modification of service encryption keys, and the activation, deactivation and steering of satellite beams over Europe.

SatCo is also positioned as an enabler for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR). The partners say the constellation will support PPDR radio frequencies, notably bands around 698–703/753–758 MHz and 733–736/788–791 MHz, to provide emergency responders with broadband connectivity in locations where terrestrial networks are unavailable or compromised.

AST SpaceMobile has submitted filings to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) through Germany to manage potential signal interference and coordinate integration with existing mobile networks.

The project is also a candidate for access to EU 2GHz Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) spectrum, which, if granted, would facilitate a pan‑European, sovereign service that uses national spectrum bands to reach consumers directly on standard smartphones.

How is satellite connectivity reshaping the European telecoms landscape? Join the discussion at Connected Germany, live in Munich!

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News

The company’s streamlining efforts continue amid revenue decline

BT has released its latest quarterly figures, revealing the extent of job cuts that have taken place over the first half of the financial year.

The figures show that the company’s headcount has been reduced by around 6% in this financial year to date, representing around 5,000 jobs, bringing the company’s total headcount to roughly 111,000.

These job cuts contributed significantly to the almost £250 million in cost savings BT has achieved in the same period.

The move is part of a long-term downsizing strategy from BT, which began in earnest in 2023 under the leadership of ex-CEO Philip Jansen. At that time, the company said it would aim to reduce costs by £3 billion by 2025, a goal that was subsequently met a year ahead of schedule.

This streamlining process has been further accelerated under new CEO Allison Kirkby, who took over the role in February 2024. Kirkby has pledged further restructuring, with BT now targeting yet another £3 billion in cost savings by 2029.

Job cuts, naturally, play a key role in this strategy. BT said in 2023 that the company is aiming to reduce its workforce by around 55,000 by the end of the decade, a move which would leave it with 75,000–90,000 staff.

Besides headcount reduction, BT’s results revealed a company still grappling with a highly competitive market. Revenues were down by 3% to £9.8 billion in H1, year-on-year, with pre-tax reduced by 11% year-on-year to £862 million. Much of this reduction, the company said, could be attributed to a fall in legacy landline services and a weaker mobile market.

The company is also under pressure in the fixed broadband sector.

Openreach, the company’s fibre network subsidiary, reported that its fibre network rollout has passed 20 million premises and remains on track to hit the company’s goal of 25 million by December 2026. However, Openreach CEO Clive Selley says the company is preparing to ‘hold fire’ on additional approvals for the additional 5 million premises needed to reach its 2030 target of 30 million until the Telecoms Access Review

The company added 1.1 million new full fibre customers in H1; however, this was not enough to offset customer losses elsewhere, with the company noting an overall decline of 242,000 broadband customers in Q2. Openreach said these losses were the result of strong competition and a weaker broadband market.

Despite this seemingly bumpy road, Kirkby maintains that the company’s wider transformation to greater growth remains on track.

“BT is delivering on its strategy in competitive markets. Since the start of the year, we’ve driven customer growth across consumer broadband, mobile and TV and we’re stabilising our UK-focused business division,” said Kirkby. “Outside the UK, we’ve completed strategic exits and we’re reshaping our international unit. BT’s transformation is delivering ahead of plan, as our UK focus and radical simplification and modernisation are helping to offset declines from our international and legacy businesses and higher labour-related costs since the start of this tax year.”

In related news in tandem with the quarterly results release, BT also announced a new deal with SpaceX’s Starlink to use the latter’s satellites to deliver connectivity across the UK’s hard-to-reach areas. Commercial launch is expected in the latter half of 2026.

Virgin Media O2 announced a similar arrangement with Starlink last week.

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Press Release

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans for a dedicated transatlantic subsea cable, Fastnet, that will link Maryland in the United States with County Cork in Ireland. The system, due to enter service in 2028, is pitched as a high‑capacity route intended to bolster resilience and capacity for cloud and artificial intelligence traffic between North America and Europe.

Fastnet is designed with route diversity in mind. Rather than following established corridors, the cable will land at two strategic points intended to provide alternative pathways if other subsea cables are damaged or disrupted. AWS says the system will use advanced optical switching branching units to enable future changes in topology and to add landing points if required, a feature that could make the route more adaptable to evolving traffic patterns and growing AI workloads.

The cable is being built with protective measures in nearshore areas – including extra armouring and steel wire layers – to mitigate risks from natural hazards and human activity. AWS is quoting a design capacity in excess of 320 terabits per second (Tbps). The company illustrates that figure by saying the system could stream around 12.5 million HD films simultaneously, and could transmit the digitised Library of Congress several times per second.

Fastnet will be integrated into AWS’s private global network rather than the public internet. AWS highlights that its centralised traffic‑monitoring and automated network management tools offer complete visibility over routes and perform continuous optimisations to avoid congestion, claiming the capability to resolve the majority of network events automatically. For customers, the proposition is access to secured, scalable transatlantic bandwidth for applications ranging from generative AI to business continuity and research.

Local engagement is also a feature of the project. AWS says it has been working with communities on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and in County Cork and will establish Community Benefit Funds in both locations to support locally identified priorities, including STEM education, workforce development, environmental programmes and social services.

Irish and Maryland officials welcomed the investment. Taoiseach Micheál Martin described the cable as a “vote of confidence” in Ireland’s digital future, framing County Cork as a gateway to Europe for submarine cables. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said the project would help position the state as a centre for innovation and high‑tech investment.

Fastnet will join an expansive AWS infrastructure footprint that the company says already spans 38 regions and roughly nine million kilometres of fibre – a figure AWS uses to convey the scale of its private network. The subsea cable market remains competitive and politically sensitive: while large cloud operators and consortia continue to invest in bespoke links to secure capacity and control, regulators and governments are increasingly attentive to the strategic implications of undersea connectivity. Fastnet’s landing choices and resilience features suggest AWS is continuing that trend by seeking greater redundancy and control over transatlantic traffic.

Partner Article 

The solution provides data centre operators a more holistic approach to their entire portfolio, providing unified security and network optimisation

The global data centre (DC) industry is experiencing a surge in investment and expansion, driven by escalating demand for cloud services, AI workloads, and edge computing. Once dominated by vast, centralised hyperscale facilities, the market is now shifting toward a more distributed model that places smaller, strategically located DCs closer to the end user. This strategic shift provides numerous benefits to the customer, providing enabling lower latency, improved resilience, and greater flexibility, but it is not without its challenges.

Running numerous DCs across different regions, each built using equipment from different vendors, is operationally complex. From network optimisation across sites to cybersecurity, managing distributed DCs is costly, and difficult to deploy and maintain.

At the Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF), jointly organised by Huawei and the United Nations Broadband Commission, Huawei showcased its answer to these challenges: Xinghe AI Fabric 2.0.

Building for the AI era

Huawei launched its first iteration of AI Fabric back in 2018 – a time when few could have imagined the speed with which the ‘AI era’ was to arrive. Nonetheless, this first release anticipated much of the pressure that AI’s widespread development and deployment would place on the DC industry, focussing on delivering zero packet loss, lower latency, and higher throughput. This provided a strong foundation for AI training, distributed storage, and high-performance computing (HPC).

In 2025, however, simply improving the traditional network is no longer enough. Date centre operators today are looking to AI to help alleviate their biggest pain points: slow deployment, manual operations, and network unreliability.

Solving these problems has been the primary focus of Huawei’s Xinghe AI Fabric 2.0, which combines a variety of AI-powered solutions to improve network security, reliability, and operations and maintenance (O&M).

From fault detection to network optimisation

First among these solutions is Huawei’s StarryWing Digital Map, which is coupled with AI to automate the notoriously complex process of cross-DC network and security provisioning. By integrating security data, this platform dynamically generates a security access matrix, which then automatically recommends policy solutions with 100% accuracy within two minutes. This replaces a previously manual scripting process that would take a typical team two days to complete.

The second element is the introduction of its AI agent, NetMaster. This platform combines four systems – unified detection, network automation, O&M management platform, and traffic visualisation – using over 45 APIs. This allows for natural language orchestration, enabling the automated resolution of 80% of fault tickets and reducing average resolution time by over 90%. This is supported by the AI Eagle Eye Engine, which uses Huawei’s proprietary IFIT (In-situ Flow Information Telemetry) technology to detect and localise faults in seconds, compared to the hours that has long been the norm.

Finally, the Xinghe AI Fabric 2.0 is aiming to dramatically reduce the impact of network outages for DC network operators. It’s Data Plane Crossing Faults (DPCF) technology uses intelligent identification and automatic switching to reduce network fault recovery time from hours to minutes, while its Dynamic Path Fast Recovery (DPFR) technology resolves local failures in just 1ms. Finally, its M-LAG technology focuses on the link itself, using optical module channel protection to improve its reliability ten-fold. Combined, this three-layer approach to outages adds significant resilience, ensuring maximum uptime across deployments.

An automation philosophy: Using AI to support AI

By incorporating AI throughout the platform’s design, DC operators’ networks are increasingly optimised, but also flexible, able to respond quickly and accurately to network faults or cybersecurity incidents without manual oversight. With service demands from enterprise customers, latency-sensitive applications, and AI workloads increasing in prominence, the ability for networks to self-deploy, self-heal, and self-optimise will soon become a necessity.

Ultimately, Xinghe AI Fabric 2.0 is the natural evolution of DC network architecture, representing the latest example of Huawei’s prevailing design philosophy of leveraging AI to support AI, here called ‘AI for Fabric and Fabric for AI’. Huawei is rapidly embracing AI throughout its portfolio, building systems that can self-evolve to meet the changing needs of a rapidly changing AI world.

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