Rome, 10 July 2024

Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators, and Aruba S.p.A, Italy’s leading provider of cloud, data centre, hosting, e-mail, domain registration and PEC (certified email) services, announce the activation of the new Sparkle’s Point of Presence (PoP) at the Hyper Cloud Data Centre of Aruba, the largest data centre campus in Rome, to be inaugurated soon. 

The agreement between Aruba and Sparkle reinforces Rome as a global connectivity hub between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia thanks to the connection with BlueMed, Sparkle’s new cable that increases connectivity in the Mediterranean basin by linking various countries – including France, Greece, Israel and Italy – with landings in Rome, Genoa, Palermo and Golfo Aranci. BlueMed is an integral part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems project. In partnership with Google and other operators, the project is set to establish a new digital infrastructure between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia with extension as far as India, and is among the first projects being implemented on the IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) set up at the G20 summit in September 2023.

Designed with an “open cable system” and “open landing station” architecture, BlueMed ensures maximum openness to other operators and the development of internet traffic interconnection ecosystems. With four fibre pairs and a capacity of over 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, BlueMed offers operators and businesses high-speed, high-performance international connections from Rome to all of Sparkle’s destinations worldwide.

Sparkle’s new PoP was activated at Aruba’s Hyper Cloud Data Centre (IT4), a technology campus located at the Tecnopolo Tiburtino, a district where more than 150 companies operate, ranging from aerospace to ICT, in an environment designed also to support the growth and development of new companies and start-ups. The data centre campus covers an area of 74,000 m² and, when fully operational, will include five independent data centres for a total of 30 MW of IT power, the first of which (DC-A) is already ANSI/TIA Rating 4 certified. Designed to the highest standards of resilience and infrastructure quality, the new hub will use renewable energy, cooling systems and highly efficient equipment.

“With the activation of the new PoP integrated with BlueMed, we intend to respond to the needs of companies and operators that require large international interconnection capacities,” said Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle. “We bring Rome closer to the world’s major connectivity exchange points thanks to a unique, low-latency route to Marseille and Palermo, integrated with the main submarine cables crossing the Mediterranean and other destinations in Sparkle’s global network.”

Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba commented: “We share with Sparkle the aim of serving companies and operators, that need large capacities, with not only connectivity but also space and power within state-of-the-art data centres that are large enough to support even the most ambitious growth plans. Being able to host a Sparkle PoP, with the availability of BlueMed, is an important building block in the consolidation of our data centres as strategic assets at a national and European level, and is perfectly in line with our carrier neutral philosophy. This approach is designed to allow customers to enjoy, in maximum autonomy, extremely reliable and high-performance internet connection solutions, and to foster the development of interconnections that benefit the entire ecosystem, making Rome an additional connectivity hub and an IT and cloud service delivery centre for the capital and all Central and Southern Italy.”

The new PoP – which already hosts important international players – adds to the four existing points of presence in Rome, increasing the capillarity of the metropolitan ring, a protected and redundant system fully integrated with Sparkle’s Tier-1 global IP network “Seabone”. Network operators, ISPs, OTTs, content and application providers can benefit from the range of IP and data services offered by Sparkle, including DDoS Protection – that gives customers the option to self-protect their networks from attacks – and Virtual NAP – which provides virtual access to leading Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) without the need to build proprietary infrastructure.

About Sparkle

Sparkle is TIM Group’s Global Operator, first international service provider in Italy and among the top worldwide, offering a full range of infrastructure and global connectivity services – capacity, IP, SD-WAN, colocation, IoT connectivity, roaming and voice – to national and international Carriers, OTTs, ISPs, Media/Content Providers, and multinational enterprises. A major player in the submarine cable industry, Sparkle owns and manages a network of more than 600,000 km of fiber spanning from Europe to Africa and the Middle East, the Americas and Asia. Its sales force is active worldwide and distributed over 33 countries.

Find out more about Sparkle following its X and LinkedIn profiles or visiting the website tisparkle.com

About Aruba S.p.A.  

Aruba S.p.A. (http://www.aruba.it), founded in 1994, is Italy’s leading provider of cloud, data centre, hosting, e-mail, domain registration and PEC (certified email) services. The company, with wholly Italian capital, has 16 million users and manages a vast infrastructure distributed on 7 data centres that includes 2.7 million registered domains, 9.8 million e-mail accounts, 9 million PEC accounts and thousands of customer IT infrastructures. Aruba PEC and Actalis are the group’s two Certification Authorities, accredited with AgID (Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale) for the provision of qualified services. Aruba’s infrastructure is also qualified by ACN (National Cybersecurity Authority) to handle ordinary, critical and also strategic PA data. In 30 years of activity, Aruba has developed extensive experience in the design and management of high-tech data centres, owned and distributed throughout Italy. The largest is located in Ponte San Pietro (BG) and features green-by-design infrastructure and facilities that comply with the highest security standards in the industry (Rating 4 ANSI/TIA-942, ISO 22237), to which is added the Hyper Cloud Data Centre in Rome, which covers 74,000 m² in the area of the Tecnopolo Tiburtino and at full capacity will include 5 independent data centres. Aruba implements energy-efficient solutions in its data centres, demonstrating its commitment to sustainability and, in addition, produces clean energy through photovoltaic plants and hydroelectric power plants. The infrastructure network also extends across Europe, with a proprietary data centre in the Czech Republic and partner facilities located in France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

For further information, please visit https://www.aruba.it/and social networks Facebook, X and LinkedIn 

Sparkle Media Contacts

sparkle.communication@tisparkle.com

X: @TISparkle

Aruba Media Contacts

Megan Cowlbeck/Lorna Miller 

aruba@rlyl.com

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry for Aruba   

Four bits of infrastructure news from around the industry: … [visit site to read more]

Vodafone Group CTO Scott Petty (third, from right) laid out how AI has the potential to fundamentally change the economic landscape of the internet, but developing markets will be slow to see this change, due to challenges such as low smartphone uptake and lack of fundamental infrastructure to drive the resource intensive “hyped” technology.

Speaking at a media briefing in London at Vodafone’s global headquarters, the chief technology officer called generative AI “probably the most overhyped technology for many years in our industry” despite its landscape shifting potential.

“Hopefully, we’re reaching the peak of those inflated expectations because we’re about to drop into a trough of disillusionment as companies really struggle to go from POCs [proof of concepts] from gen AI and create real scale benefits across large organisations,” said Petty.

There are a host of challenges that make tapping into gen AI “difficult to do”. Petty detailed Vodafone is adopting a “partnership model” whereby Vodafone taps the “largest hyper scaler producers” of AI, instead of building from the ground up by installing graphics processing, installing them in data centres, and building its own large language model (LLM).

Vodafone announced in January a 10-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to leverage AI and enhance its operations across its global footprint.

This is the right approach he argued as the latter would leave the operator perpetually behind as the technology is rapidly evolving. Also, tapping into public LLMs such as Open AI’s platform would expose the operator to data privacy challenges.

Vodafone developed and “fine-tuned” LLMs for generative AI applications in multiple areas to streamline business processes, boost employee productivity and upgrade its chatbot TOBi.

In total, Vodafone has built 600 models with traditional AI and machine learning for various use case stemming from financial modelling to network prediction, and they have “delivered a lot of value”.

The key to getting gen AI right is quality of data, said Petty. Vodafone has been pooling its data ocean since 2016 which now totals 24 petabytes. By doing so, LLMs can deliver accurate answers and avoid AI data hallucinations, which is when a LLM reads a pattern of data to give nonsensical or inaccurate answers.

Vodafone developed and experimented with an AI-powered FAQ search tool for contact centre agents which only produced results at an accuracy rate of only 25%, this was how Vodafone recognised its data quality was “crap” said Petty.

“We hadn’t been lifecycle managing so we were answering iPhone 15 questions with iPhone 13 data, we weren’t managing the infrastructure that goes behind that. So a key critical success factor in generative AI is your data management, data quality, data accuracy, and the way that the organisation manages that data. The tooling that you apply on top of that it’s important but it’s actually the data quality that that makes a massive difference to that model,” said Petty.

Reshaping the economic model of the internet

By getting AI right with the correct architecture and guard rails in place, Petty said in the coming years there will be a “fundamental change in the internet and the way we use it to serve customers and as a channel to market”.

He pointed to Apple’s recent announcement of installing Open AI’s ChatGPT LLM into its iPhones, and how other smartphone manufacturers have been pushing in this direction. This will change how people access the internet, as consumers will be using AI as their “primary agent” to the internet.

“Generative AI capabilities running on the device have the potential to fundamentally reshape the economic model of the internet that we have today.

“The economic model on the internet today is really simple. You go to a search box, you type something in and depending on who paid the most money or did the best search engine optimisation, you’re presented with a set of results that dictate what you do and from that is driven the whole advertising economic model that sits behind the internet,” Petty explained.

The executive highlighted how consumers can circle with a stylus an image on screen of a Samsung device, which can then produce purchasing options, as an example of a “different digital channel.”

In a potential world where people are circling images or talking to LLMs to replace the billions of daily ‘Google searches’, “I can’t use search engine optimisation to present Vodafone as the best experience. I need to interface into the LLM or the bot running on the device to present the experience with Vodafone is better than it is with other operators,” said Petty.

Lack of infrastructure in developing markets

The AI revolution and the fundamental landscape change it could deliver will trickle slowly down to emerging markets, as many expect.

Petty said availability of infrastructure such as data centres from hyper scalers to support any next generation technology is “not as well deployed”.

“We build more capabilities in our own data centres using the same technology but hosted in our models. We have very strong financial services business in Africa, with M-PESA and we’re applying gen AI capabilities to our financial services business, which we don’t have in Europe. So there are different areas and different focus points that we use [gen AI in].

He highlighted another challenge, one that has been a constant in emerging markets, and that’s availability of smartphones.

“Africa still has huge proportion of the population that don’t have smartphones and therefore chat is not an effective interface for them, they still use USSD as an interface.  There’s a lot of differences in those [emerging] markets. How they apply the framework and the architecture [for AI] is still the same, but the use cases we build is different.”

Vodafone’s chief technology officer laid out the initial plan on operator group will be tapping into AI but warned to manage expectations as it is not the silver bullet operators are looking for, yet. But to truly harness AI and have meaningful impact to operations, Petty warned solid ground work is needed in governance, data and partnerships.  

The TM Forum’s CEO Nik Willetts revealed recently that only a handful of operators have successfully used AI to affect their bottom-line, but even then, these would have been small gains, for now.

How AI will affect developing markets remains to be seen. But if investment into the technology continues at this rapid rate, new innovations to boost lower to middle income nations could be here before we know it.  

News

Article by Bradford Randall, originally published on Total Telecom’ sister site, Broadband Communities

Viavi Solutions Inc., also known as VIAVI, has announced a strategic partnership with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to expand Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) testing capabilities for VIAVI’s Automated Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN, also known as VALOR.

The efforts, according to VIAVI, were made possible by a $21.7 million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund.

According to the company’s July 8 release, the money helped fund the creation of VALOR, which “provides a pathway to certification in the U.S. for new entrants, startups, and academia.”

“By bringing VALOR’s test-as-a-service capabilities to TIP, VIAVI advances the mission of TIP’s OpenRAN Project Group and enhances the broader industry’s ability to implement and certify Open RAN technologies,” the release stated.

As part of the partnership, VALOR, which “offers cloud-based and virtual testing capabilities critical for modern, scalable network performance assessments,” will be incorporated into TIP’s system performance certification program.

Dr. Sameh Yamany, the chief technology officer at VIAVI, said the partnership addresses deployment challenges faced by vendors.

“This initiative aims to reduce market fragmentation, create supply chain efficiencies, and build marketplace confidence through standardized testing and certification processes​,” Yamany said.

With the announcement, VALOR has become the first of TIP’s authorized test labs, according to VIAVI’s release.

Kristian Toivo, TIP’s executive director, said end-to-end testing, like that provided by VALOR, “ensures that Open RAN systems meet high-performance standards and are robust enough to handle real-world network complexities, thereby maintaining service quality and reducing downtime.”

Toivo said VALOR’s Open RAN virtual testing environment bring new capabilities to TIP’s community.

“This strategic engagement fosters innovation, improves supply chain resilience, and accelerates the global adoption of Open RAN technologies, offering operators more flexible, cost-effective, and high-performance network solutions​,” Toivo said.

As a result of the partnership, TIP plans to leverage VALOR’s capabilities to help build a performance certification framework to promote industry alignment, according to VIAVI’s release.

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News from four regional fiber projects in four different parts of the US to keep up with: … [visit site to read more]

Connectivity between New York City and New Jersey is a critical piece of the nation’s infrastructure. But it has been a while since we’ve seen new infrastructure built across the Hudson River. Yesterday that changed as Global InterXchange announced it’s new carrier neutral dark fiber deployment has officially gone live. … [visit site to read more]

Targeting an important market of which all Indian operators would no doubt like a slice, Vodafone Idea’s enterprise arm, Vi Business, and digital financial services provider PayU have entered into a strategic partnership to offer bespoke digital payment solutions to Indian micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

The two companies say the partnership will combine Vi Business’s digital transformation solutions and PayU’s expertise in digital payments and financial services solutions to offer a comprehensive suite of services designed to address the growing needs of MSMEs.

Vi Business and PayU say they will provide MSMEs with payment solutions, an offers engine, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options, and WhatsApp integration eliminating the need for redirection between apps or websites.

Vi Business, as part of its dedicated MSME programme, ReadyForNext is also offering an exclusive range of productivity and collaboration digital tools tailor-made for MSMEs at special prices. The products include location tracking, Google Workspace, personal cloud storage and mobile security solutions.

Vi Business, formerly known as Vodafone Idea Business Services, says it brings a range of enterprise-grade services and solutions to support the growing needs of its business customers ranging from small home offices to large multi-national companies.

Operating in more than 50 markets and home to 43 different nationalities, in addition to providing advanced e-commerce payment solutions for nearly half a million global merchants, PayU says it is  also one of the world’s top global fintech investors, as well as a leading provider of consumer credit solutions in emerging markets.

News

The company says the new funding from the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) will help them to “accelerate” their ongoing full fibre rollout

Today, altnet Hyperoptic has announced a new £150 million investment from the UKIB to continue rolling out fibre-to-the-home across the country.

This additional funding increases the company’s total raised this year to £255 million, and total overall to £1.1 billion. The funding follows a report in February in which Hyperoptic said they were seeking to raise an additional £500 million to further fund their rollout.

At a time when investment in fibre has largely dried up, Hyperoptic says this latest investment represents continued support for the company’s business plan.

“Since 2011, we’ve been on a mission to bring ultra-reliable, hyperfast full fibre broadband to businesses and consumers across urban areas and new developments in the UK. We’re acutely aware of the government’s target to achieve 99% gigabit-capable broadband coverage by 2030 and, as an industry, we still have some way to go to achieve it,” said Dana Tobak CBE, CEO and Co-Founder of Hyperoptic. “We welcome the support of the UK Infrastructure Bank, together with other investors, enabling us to continue delivering award-winning gigabit-capable broadband to more people across the UK every day.”

“Reliable internet connectivity is increasingly important to participate in the modern economy and drive forward the UK’s net zero and regional growth ambitions. Our investment in Hyperoptic will ensure that the scale and pace of the full fibre rollout is sustained, specifically in those areas where it’s needed the most, opening up opportunity for numerous communities across the UK,” added Ian Brown, Head of Banking & Investments at UKIB. “We hope that our commitment will help mobilise further private debt financing for Hyperoptic’s continued network expansion.”

Since its foundation in 2011, Hyperoptic has grown to be one of the largest altnets in the UK, with a full fibre network that passes 1.73 million homes and serves roughly 340,000 customers. The company is aiming to increase these figures to 2 million and 500,000, respectively, by the end of this year.

The new investment represents something of a reinvigoration for Hyperoptic, with the company having last year cutting 110 jobs and extended their build timeline due to the challenging operating environment.

Join Hyperoptic CEO Dana Tobak in discussion at this year’s Connected Britain conference, the UK’s largest digital economy event

Also in the news:
Australian Government and AWS Collaborate to Strengthen country’s Cybersecurity
Solving congestion challenges in FTTP deployment
Vodafone Invests £120m in AI Chatbot ‘SuperTOBi’

Some interconnection, some financing, and some 5G: … [visit site to read more]

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