Malaysian telco U Mobile is reportedly set to deploy between 5,000 and 7,000 5G sites across the country as it prepares to take on the role of the country’s second 5G operator, and is likely to collaborate with other telcos in the process.

U Mobile hasn’t yet officially revealed its roll-out plan, but according to a report from The Edge Malaysia on Friday, RHB Research – citing industry sources – said that U Mobile is planning to upgrade existing 4G sites and install new 5G sites to roll out its network.

RHB also said it expects U Mobile to team up with other operators and share infrastructure, which would not only speed up site deployments, but also save anywhere from RM3 billion (US$665.3 million) to RM4 billion in capex.

Before it received the nod from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) last November to become the country’s second 5G operator to take on Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), U Mobile signed a deal with rival telco CelcomDigi in February 2024 to share 100 multi-operator core network sites, as well as collaborate on developing use cases for 5G-Advanced (5G-A). In July 2024, U Mobile also established a strategic 5G backhaul partnership with Time dotCom.

U Mobile also spent July forming strategic partnerships with eight state-backed network facility provider companies (SBCs) from the PPIT Consortium to streamline the 5G rollout process. U Mobile also signed a similar deal with Axiata-owned Edotco that month.

RHB noted that U Mobile will likely fund all this via a mix of vendor financing, deferred payment options, and debt funding. U Mobile announced in late July last year that it has signed an MoU with AmBank Group, who will provide financing solutions to cover the cost of rolling out the second 5G network.

One of the controversies over awarding the second 5G network to U Mobile was how a relatively smaller telco would be able to cover the rollout cost. In November, according to a separate Edge Malaysia report, CIMB Securities said in a research note that U Mobile would need to invest up to MYR3 billion over 18–24 months to cover 80% of the population, and MYR1 billion a year after that, which is higher than U Mobile’s average capitalised capex of MYR500 million per annum between FY2014 to FY2023.

U Mobile responded that it has “robust financial backing from its shareholders, financial institutions such as UOB, CIMB and AmBank, as well as strategic vendor partners who enable the telco to continuously innovate to stay competitive and to meet network deployment targets.”

News 

Vodafone has announced today that it has sold its remaining 79.2 million shares in Indus Towers Limited, a 3% stake in the company 

The sale raised INR 28 billion ($330 million), according to a recent stock market filing. Vodafone used $105 million of this to repay loans tied to its Indian assets and cover transaction costs.  

The remaining $225 million was invested in its Indian mobile subsidiary Vodafone Idea (Vi), increasing the company’s stake in the operator from 22.56% to 24.39%. Vi will use these funds to settle outstanding payments to Indus Towers, thereby completing Vodafone’s financial commitments to the company. 

Vodafone has gradually been divesting of its Indus Towers stake since 2022, gradually reducing its stake from 28% to 21.5% last year. In June, the company announced it was looking to sell a further 10% in the company, but a surge of interest saw them reconsider the scale of the stake sale. 

Vodafone sold an 18% stake worth $1.8 billion to a variety of buyers, including SBI Mutual Fund, Kotak Securities, and rival telco (and Indus Towers shareholder) Bharti Airtel. Airtel is now the company’s largest stakeholder, owning 49% of the business. 

Vi has faced significant challenges in the Indian market, struggling to stay afloat amid intense competition from Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel for many years. Despite securing funding earlier this year, the company continues to steadily lose subscribers to its rivals. 

The company lags behind competitors in 4G deployment and has yet to roll out 5G services at scale, unlike Jio and Airtel, both of whom launched 5G in 2022 and millions of users. Cash-strapped Vi is taking a more cautious approach, primarily focusing on expanding its 4G network to cover 90% of India’s population by mid-2025. 

In October last year, Vi announced the launch of commercial 5G services by March this year, starting with Delhi and Mumbai, and expanding to other major cities across 17 regions.  

This follows recent multi-billion dollar deals with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung to upgrade 75,000 existing 4G sites over the next three years.  

Keep up to date with all the latest telecoms news from around the world with the Total Telecom newsletter  

Also in the news: 

VEON and Starlink to launch Direct-to-Cell Satellite connectivity in Ukraine
Swisscom completes acquisition of Vodafone Italia
Equinix to buy BT’s Irish data centre business for €59m

News 

Nokia has been selected by Openreach to deliver its One Network Platform, an open-access fibre network designed to connect millions of homes and businesses across the UK 

The project will see Nokia deploy a wide range of technology upgrades across Openreach’s network, aiming to boost efficiencies and simplify further fibre rollouts.  

Using Nokia’s Altiplano and NSP controllers, Openreach will be able to automate its fibre services across various technologies, which they say will simplify operations and reduce network complexity by 85%. The system also includes real-time monitoring tools to give Openreach better insights into how the network is performing. 

Openreach’s network provides wholesale broadband to around 300 service providers, ranging from cities down to remote rural areas. Nokia’s technology will make the new platform flexible, efficient, and scalable to meet customer needs. It will also reduce the number of exchange buildings required to cover the UK, making the network more streamlined. 

The new system is built with a modular design, helping Openreach create a large-scale network while cutting power and the space required by over 50% at Ethernet exchange sites. T 

“This is the next step in our plans to build a future-proof, multi-service, one network platform – that supports both full FTTP and future Ethernet products. Introducing Nokia’s Altiplano and NSP network domain controllers and 7250 IXR data centre routers will boost automation, network visibility and control, and product flexibility for our Communication Provider customers and their end-user customers,” said Trevor Linney, Director of Network Technology at Openreach in a press release. 

“Ultimately, this is about making our network easier to manage, more efficient and reliable, for example, through quicker identification of faults via automation, and helping to cut operational costs,” he continued.the project will expand Openreach’s full fibre network from 17 million properties today to 25 million by the end of 2026, meeting the rising demand for faster broadband. 

How is the UK fibre market evolving in 2025? Join the discussion at Connected North live in Manchester 

Also in the news: 

VEON and Starlink to launch Direct-to-Cell Satellite connectivity in Ukraine
Swisscom completes acquisition of Vodafone Italia
Equinix to buy BT’s Irish data centre business for €59m

Two items from the UK, and two more from the Middle East: … [visit site to read more]

Contributed Article

The optical distribution network (ODN) is a point-to-multipoint passive optical network (PON), as shown in FIG. 2-1. The ODN is an optical transmission channel from an optical line terminal (OLT) in a central office (CO) to multiple optical network units (ONUs) on the user side.

In traditional ODN construction, the feeder optical cables, distribution optical cables, and drop cables are stripped or terminated onsite for fiber connection. In both OSP and ISP scenarios, cable distribution boxes need to be opened before optical cable installation and connection.
It is difficult to monitor the traditional ODN resources in real time because the ODN is passive. Currently, the traditional ODN resources are managed mainly by means of manual onsite recording with paper labels. Therefore, problems such as difficult fault locating and delayed update of maintenance information exist in the data entry and resource maintenance phases, causing heavy workloads and low efficiency. Even faults and errors caused by data information deviation may occur. As the scale of the broadband access network increases, the traditional ODNs face a series of challenges in applications.

In the traditional ODN, the connection status of optical ports in the cable distribution box is usually labeled on patch cords and recorded in a chart attached to the box. The installation and maintenance personnel manually record the connection status on site and enter the information into the system afterwards. After long-term O&M, the paper labels may fall off or severely fade, causing disordered port scheduling and failing to sort out the connections with the patch cords. According to survey statistics, the accuracy of optical port information manually recorded by some carriers outside China is lower than 70%.
In addition, because the optical ports of the conventional ODN distribution box are not associated with the ONUs/ONTs of users, after the users apply for network exit, information indicating release of the optical ports cannot be fed back to the resource management system in a timely manner. As a result, the cables are still connected but the user devices have been removed. The resource silence rate of some carriers outside China reaches up to 10% to 20%, wasting the initial construction investment. Even some feeder and distribution optical cables also need to be reconstructed after resource silence, reducing the efficiency of the investment in the optical network construction.
Inaccurate ODN connection information has always been a major challenge for carriers. The traditional O&M depends on manual operations and has many problems. Therefore, strict processes and specifications are required to improve the resource management accuracy.
How to resolve the bottleneck of the traditional ODNs will be the focus of research on digital and intelligent ODNs. Therefore, to address the challenges faced by the traditional ODN construction and health management, digital and intelligent management is required for the next-generation ODNs.
As the fiber infrastructure, the ODN is the most complex and costly part of fiber to the home (FTTH) construction. How to reduce the construction and O&M difficulties has been a continuous research topic in the industry. Based on the industry consensus, three generations are defined for different evolution phases of the digital and intelligent ODN solution, as shown in the following figure.

A digital and intelligent ODN system connects the OLT and ONUs through digital and intelligent ODN hardware, and connects to the carriers’ operation support system (OSS, including the resource management system and fault management system) in the upstream direction, to collect optical path information from the ODN network, restore the optical path topology, and demarcate and locate faults. The following figure shows the position of the digital and intelligent ODN system on the network.

The digital and intelligent ODN system consists of the physical label, digital and intelligent ODN device, intelligent optical path sensing device, intelligent management terminal, intelligent management system, and dumb resource collection and control module. It supports interconnection with the third-party OSS system. The following figure shows the reference model of the digital and intelligent ODN.

The construction of the digital and intelligent ODN includes reconstruction of the traditional ODN and new deployments. The following figure shows the functional entity model in the traditional ODN reconstruction scenario.

The following figure shows the functional entity model in the new deployment scenario.

Currently, the commercial digital and intelligent ODN technologies belong to ODN 2.0, and the ODN 3.0 technology is still in the R&D phase. The following describes the ODN 2.0 solution and its applications. The digital and intelligent ODN is a passive ODN network that is highly automated and intelligent in terms of precise resource management and fast service provisioning by introducing new technologies such as digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its lifecycle, including planning, construction, acceptance, O&M, and maintenance. It improves the O&M efficiency and quality. The following figure shows the requirements for network digitalization throughout the ODN lifecycle.

In traditional networking of digital and intelligent ODNs, an intelligent optical path sensing device, optical path switching device (OSW), and optical coupler are deployed on the OLT side, and an intelligent digital optical splitter with the split ratio of 1:4 or 1:8 is installed in the level-1 FDT.

In new deployment scenarios of QuickConnect ODNs, each link consists of a Hub Box, multiple Sub Boxes, and one End Box (all of them have a built-in intelligent digital optical splitter). The onsite construction procedure is the same as that of traditional QuickConnect devices, without additional processes or requirements. In this way, intelligent O&M can be implemented in coordination with the intelligent optical path sensing device and OSW device on the OLT side, to support remote acceptance and fault demarcation and locating, as shown in the following figure.

In the reconstruction scenarios for QuickConnect ODN networking, because the shell of the QuickConnect product cannot be opened, external intelligent digital optical cables or fiber adapters can be used to upgrade the optical splitters on the live network so that the optical splitters have digital-intelligent capabilities to support intelligent O&M, remote acceptance, and fault demarcation and locating, thereby implementing live network reconstruction, as shown in the following figure.

The following figure shows the CO migration for OLT upgrade when the intelligent optical path sensing device and optical path switch unit are installed in the OLT subrack.

The ODN is an important part of a fiber bandwidth network. The traditional ODN cannot meet the requirements of high-quality development of fiber broadband networks due to long construction period, high deployment cost, difficult fiber management, and slow troubleshooting. Therefore, the digital and intelligent ODN has become the ODN evolution direction due to cost-effective deployment, efficient management and O&M, and simplified connections.
Based on the technologies such as identification of branch optical lines, QuickConnect, and uneven optical splitting of optical splitters, the digital and intelligent ODN features automatic setup of network topology, real-time monitoring of the line status, flexible scalability, easy construction and maintenance, and precise resource management, thereby implementing visualized management of access network resources throughout the lifecycle.

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Ohad Peled, Product Marketing Manager at Sony Semiconductor Israel

The global home medical equipment market is experiencing explosive growth. Smart devices are being used to monitor and treat patients suffering from diabetes, cardiac disorders, and other medical conditions without exposing those patients to the risk of hospital-acquired infections. Numerous organizations, including the World Health Organization and the National Council of Aging, are promoting self-health management to give patients better outcomes. … [visit site to read more]

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Indian telco Reliance Jio is reportedly moving to ramp up onboarding of new customers for its AirFiber 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) business over the next year in an apparent move to boost 5G ARPUs ahead of a planned IPO later this year.

According to a report from ETTelecom on Thursday, citing various analyst reports, Jio has been scaling up distribution and optimising the onboarding process for its AirFiber service to enable it to add at least 1 million new customers every 30 days.

Jio had over 2.8 million AirFiber connections at the end of September 2024, and was projected to add another 1.9 million home broadband users by the end of 2024, the report said.

In essence, Jio is banking on AirFiber to boost network traffic on its 5G network as well as its monthly 5G ARPU, which is three times higher for AirFiber than for Jio’s mobile 5G ARPU, the report said.

Despite having one of the largest 5G subscriber bases in the world, Jio has been struggling to monetise 5G after spending a reported US$25 billion (including spectrum costs) to roll out its nationwide network. Part of that has to do with initially promoting the service with unlimited data plans, as well as migrating low-value JioBharat phone users to 5G, which has kept ARPU relatively low. 

In July 2024, Jio raised the price of its mobile 5G packages to boost 5G revenue, but the impact on its finance sheets won’t appear until at least the fourth quarter of this year, according to analyst estimates.

As such, growing its AirFiber business by a million new customers a month could enable Jio to boost 5G ARPU faster. That in turn would make a potential IPO for Jio’s parent company, Jio Platforms Ltd, more attractive, the report said.

Earlier this week, Sanford C Bernstein reportedly valued Jio Platforms at US$98 billion. At that valuation under current rules, a Jio Platforms IPO could be worth around INR421 billion (US$490.1 million), which would make it the largest IPO in Indian history.

That said, ETTelecom also reports, a senior Jio official recently told the publication Jio Platforms isn’t in a hurry to launch an IPO, as its investors – which include Google, Silver Lake, and Mubadala Investment Co “are committed for the long-term”.

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Based in Singapore, Sarah’s extensive expertise in international digital infrastructure will continue Telstra International’s leadership in the Wholesale market. With 25 years’ industry experience, Sarah previously served as Chief Revenue Officer for Neos Networks, a UK infrastructure business managing both Enterprise and Wholesale and held the position of Business Development Director for Telefonica Global Solutions, overseeing sales, commercial, and solution design teams across LatAm, EMEA, and Asia Pacific.

“Telstra International has unrivalled network reach and footprint in subsea cabling in the Asia Pacific region, boosted by an established Cable Landing Station footprint and terrestrial Data Centre connectivity. We have a huge opportunity for exponential growth. The depth and breadth of experience that Telstra International brings to market, alongside the significant digital infrastructure capability positions us well to lead. There is increasing demand for robust connectivity, significant capacity and digital services and we are poised to meet this demand head-on,” said Sarah Mills, Head of Wholesale, Telstra International.

At the heart of Sarah’s operations will be the customer, sustainable operations and expanding on diversity and inclusion.

“Sarah’s extensive experience and passion for partnering with customers make her an invaluable addition to our team. Her leadership will be instrumental as we continue to invest in critical digital infrastructure and upgrade technology to provide capacity on our subsea cable systems, ensuring we are placed to meet the increasing demand for data being driven by emerging technologies.

“Sarah’s clearly motivated by enabling people to be their best and fostering a collaborative environment. Her dedication to excellence and her strategic vision will be key drivers in our ongoing efforts to innovate and lead in the industry,” said Roary Stasko, CEO of Telstra International.