Mastercard and pan-African digital payments company Onafriq announced on Monday that they are collaborating to increase accessibility to mobile payment services for consumers and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Africa.

Under the agreement, Mastercard and Onafriq plan to deliver secure, cost-effective, and innovative payment options – including mobile money transactions, cross-border remittances, and cross-border settlements – to drive the growth of digital financial services across the continent.

Onafriq said the collaboration will enable it to leverage Mastercard’s technology to support its consumers’ digital commerce needs, interactions, and experiences.

“We are excited about our collaboration with Mastercard, as we share a strong alignment of vision and mission, interoperability, and markets, said Onafriq founder and CEO Dare Okoudjou in a statement. “In addition, we both understand that financial inclusion is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic priority for economic development in Africa.”

The Onafriq is also part of Mastercard’s push into the pan-African fintech market. In early February, Mastercard took a minority stake in MTN Group Fintech, the digital financial services arm of MTN. At the end of the same month, MTN Group Fintech signed a multi-market agreement with Mastercard to use its technology and capabilities.

“Technological advancements are steering the digital financial services industry, and providing accessible digital payment solutions is imperative for empowering consumers to seamlessly transition to digital commerce,” said Amnah Ajmal, EVP of market development for EEMEA at Mastercard. “We seek to leverage fintech partnerships in Africa to catalyze transformative change across industries that benefit individuals, communities, and businesses.”

Africa’s mobile money sector is said to be one of the most established and fastest growing fintech industries in the world. The latest report on the global mobile money industry from GSMA says there are 835 million registered mobile money accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 48% of global users and registering a 19% increase year on year.

The word Quantum is a bit of a unique buzzword in that what it means for the future is simultaneously more revolutionary and poorly understood than usual.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t time to take action to get involved in some form.  With us today is Tom Dakich, founder and CEO of Quantum Corridor, which is building a network meant to connect quantum computers to each other and to the resources they need.  Tom previously helped found and build Digital Crossroad, the new data center in Hammond, Indiana. … [visit site to read more]

Indian telco Vodafone Idea reportedly plans to raise as much as Rs180 billion (just over US$2.1 billion) this week in what is expected to be India’s biggest follow-on public offering (FPO) as it seeks to pay off debts and get back in the 5G game.

According to a statement from Vodafone Idea on Friday, its board has approved the launch of the FPO, with shares priced at Rs10-11 each. That represents a “discount of around 15% compared to last closing price of Rs12.95,” the statement said.

The FPO is scheduled to kick off this Thursday April 18, and run until April 22. According to ETTelecom, if the FPO goes as planned, it will be the largest in India since July 2020, when Yes Bank’s FPO raised Rs150 billion.

Vodafone Idea plans to follow the FPO by raising another Rs25 billion via debt financing. Earlier this month, shareholders approved a plan revealed in late February to raise Rs20 billion through equity and equity-linked instruments.

Vodafone Idea – frequently described as “cash strapped” – needs the funding to pay off debts, update its 4G infrastructure and make good on plans to launch 5G services in the second half of this year. According to its latest financial figures for the fiscal third quarter, Vodafone Idea’s net debt widened to Rs2.14 trillion in the fiscal third quarter, while its bank debt is around Rs45 billion.

If everything pans out, Indian tower company Indus Towers is expected to be a major beneficiary of Vodafone Idea’s fundraising blitz.

A separate report from ETTelecom said that the fundraising plan would not only enable Vodafone Idea to pay its debts to Indus, but also give Indus between 40,000 and 45,000 new tenancies as the telco expands its network. A research note from Jeffries estimated that Indus could also post an 8% CAGR boost in operating income through FY24-27 as a result, the report said.

News 

The move comes in response to countries like the US, China, and Japan, each of which is investing heavily in their domestic semiconductor industry  

The South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced this week that the country will invest 9.4 trillion won ($6.94 billion) in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2027 in an effort to maintain a leading global position in the semiconductor chips industry. 

The announcement also included a separate 1.4 trillion won ($1.01 billion) to support domestic AI semiconductor firms. 

“Current competition in semiconductors is an industrial war and an all-out war between nations,” said Yoon in a speech. 

“To set up an all-out response system that rises to the level of that for a wartime situation, we will review all proposals to attract semiconductor industries starting with investment incentives,” he continued. 

“We will rise to the level of a G3 (world’s top three) country in AI technology and get over 10% of the global market for system semiconductors by 2030.” 

Semiconductors are a key element of South Korea’s economy. In March, chip exports reached their highest revenue in 21 months at $11.7 billion, which is almost a fifth of all total exports.  

The country is under increasing pressure to keep up with key global players such as the US, China, and Japan. Each of these nation’s is providing large incentives to semiconductor companies, seeking to increase their domestic production and reduce reliance on the geopolitically fraught global market. On Monday, for example, the US government announced that it has signed a preliminary agreement to award Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) a subsidy of $6.6 billion to build new chip production fabs in Arizona.  

The South Korean government is not the only part of the country focussed heavily on the rapid development of AI. The country’s largest telco, South Korea Telecom (SKT) also shares the country’s vision on becoming a global leader in the field. The operator has confirmed its intention to become an AI powerhouse, investing in multiple AI firms including Anthropic and Persona AI.  

SKT is also working with other global telcos to further its AI ambitions. Last July, the company joined forces with a trio of international telco giants – e&, Deutsche Telecom, and Singtel – to form the Global Telco AI Alliance, seeking to combine their collective AI expertise to help co-develop new, innovative products for telco customers. 

Keep up to date with the latest international telecoms news by subscribing to the Total Telecom daily newsletter 

Also in the news:
Digi Spain sells 6m FTTH accesses to Onivia
Vodafone’s 5G standalone network now connects around half the German population
Broadband poles no problem for Brits says new study

News

Daisy Group is one of the UK’s largest privately-held IT services companies  

Matthew Riley, Chairman of business-to-business telecommunications and IT provider Daisy Communications Group has set a £215 million deal to acquire 4Com, a Bournemouth– based communications, IT, and broadband provider. 

According to Sky News, who have broken the story, the deal is expected to be signed in the coming days. 

Riley was attracted to 4Com because of its cloud communications product HiHi, a business phone with in-built video calling technology. 

The deal will increase Daisy’s small and medium enterprise (SME) customer base to more than 200,000, with revenues from the division reaching over £400 million.  

Daisy has itself made 12 acquisitions in the last 18 months, the most recent being the acquisition of 128 customers from Meraki Communications last November. The deal’s financial details were not disclosed. 

Daisy has declined to comment on the news. 

In 2022, Daisy acquired one of its main rivals XLN, leaving it with an additional 120,000 customers and making the company second only to BT in the UK SME telecoms market.  

Get involved in the North’s telecoms industry by attending Connected North, 22-23 April in Manchester. Get your tickets now! 

Also in the news:
Digi Spain sells 6m FTTH accesses to Onivia
Vodafone’s 5G standalone network now connects around half the German population
Broadband poles no problem for Brits says new study

Press Release

Ericsson and Swisscom today announce the expansion of their longstanding partnership with a new multi-year agreement to boost its innovation ecosystem, and drive the next period of growth and energy efficient performance of the service provider’s 5G network in Switzerland.

Swisscom’s mobile network has been top ranked in Switzerland for the past seven years in the connect magazine (and umlaut measuring institute) mobile network test. The results indicate the reliability and performance of its mobile network which has evolved in recent years under Swisscom’s cloud-native transformation plans. In addition to providing outstanding 5G experience to its users, with these new additions to its network, Swisscom is also reinforcing its focus on sustainability by implementing products and solutions that improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.

The new agreement will see the introduction of Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP) to provide comprehensive multi-technology network management and automation for the Swisscom network. The adoption of the platform means Swisscom can take advantage of the growing Ericsson portfolio of rApps, including AI powered Cognitive Software rApps, as well as rApps available from other contributors to the open EIAP rApp Ecosystem. The EIAP ecosystem and Software Development Toolkit (SDK) will be an essential tool for Swisscom to enhance its subscribers’ service experience while delivering operational savings through industrial scale automation in the radio access network. That focus on subscriber experience will be further boosted by Swisscom’s renewal of its Ericsson Expert Analytics deployment. Powered by machine-learning and artificial intelligence technology, it analyzes and resolves potential subscriber issues in real-time to ensure unrivalled quality of service for users.

The new contract will also see the introduction of Ericsson’s award-winning and highly energy-efficient lightweight dual-band Radio 4490, as well as a next-generation RAN processor from Ericsson’s RAN Compute portfolio. With the capacity to serve all new and existing radio technologies from a single box, Ericsson RAN Compute processor is characterized by a small footprint and low energy consumption, and the ability to support real-time AI processing without capacity loss. Swisscom further aims to equip a large number of sites with Ericsson’s Massive MIMO portfolio in the next three years as a part of the continued effort to expand mid-band TDD coverage further.

Another important development stream is marked by continuous spectrum refarming to New Radio (NR), with which the service provider prepares its network for 5G Standalone deployment with the possibility of launching new services.

Ericsson has long provided Swisscom with its Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) solution to support its telecom applications. With this new deal the service provider will now take on Ericsson’s Cloud Native Infrastructure solution (CNIS). For Swisscom, this means further enhancing the network’s well-established reliability and expanding the ability to host cloud-native telecom applications from Ericsson as well as from third-party providers. It will also help reduce overheads needed to manage the cloud platform and infrastructure, introduce further energy efficiencies, and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) overall. The deployment will bring together a close collection of telecom partner companies such as Extreme Networks and Dell Technologies, which contribute components, infrastructure and capabilities to the solution, all collaboratively engaged to ensure Swisscom and its subscribers enjoy the best possible network performance.

Finally, the latest agreement will underpin the continuation of Swisscom and Ericsson’s deeply collaborative relationship, with further links drawn between product development teams ensuring smooth access to the latest Ericsson software innovations and updates.

Gerd Niehage, CTIO Swisscom says: “We’ve been working closely with Ericsson for over 10 years with a great amount of trust and success. We are now taking the next step in this long-standing strategic partnership as we endeavour to turn Switzerland’s best network into its smartest one. This will enable us to not only offer our customers the best customer experience, but also to place an even greater focus on sustainability and innovation.”

Daniel Leimbach, Head of Customer Unit Western Europe at Ericsson, adds, “In this innovative partnership, Swisscom’s characteristically Swiss pursuit of perfection meets the global technology leadership from Sweden’s Ericsson. Our common goal is to raise the bar even higher and continue to develop Switzerland’s best network into its smartest one. We have already managed in recent years to set important benchmarks for the global development of the telecommunications market from within Switzerland.”

Also in the news:
Digi Spain sells 6m FTTH accesses to Onivia
Vodafone’s 5G standalone network now connects around half the German population
Broadband poles no problem for Brits says new study

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One of our goals when designing features for our products at Bicom Systems is to ensure they are what our clients ultimately want, and we make sure that remains the case.

4.6 emphasizes this as we have gone back and improved or outright overhauled several long-standing features in order to bring them up to modern standards.

Additionally, we have introduced several new quality-of-life features to enhance the overall client experience with both SERVERware and sipPROT.

Here is what we have in store for you this time around.

sipPROT

Bicom Systems’ beloved SIP attack protection module has received an overhaul to a majority of its features, making them more intuitive, be it visually or mechanically, as well as a number of new features aimed at enhancing its functionality.

The sipPROT Dashboard Reimagined

The first, and much needed feature that was added to sipPROT’s arsenal is the dashboard, allowing users to have all of the important operational data displayed in one location from firewall status to graphs showcasing the number of attacks per endpoint and the spread of blocked IPs per country with the corresponding world map visual distribution.

Attack Logs

The “Attack Logs” tab serves as the main risk coordination tool for admins, displaying the SIP attack log on the current system with each individual instance being populated with the relevant information: the attacker’s and victim’s IP addresses, the type and time of attack, and the User Agent with more information available when the dropdown arrow found next to each log is clicked on.

This simplified layout helps provide more intuitive insight into overall system security and should help improve attack pattern recognition.

This should also affect both response time and deployed safety measure quality, helping attack instances get resolved at a much quicker pace.

Dynamic Denylist Improvements

While the “Allowlist” and “Denylist” tabs remain largely unchanged, the “Dynamic Denylist” tab has seen some further refinement in reducing tedious manual input across all hosts when an address gets dynamically blocked by having that process automated by the system, in essence, having all hosts share a singular dynamic denylist.

Additionally, it too now shows the User Agent tied to the blocked address’ device.

The New Settings Menu

The settings menu has been split across three different segments:

– The General Settings menu under the “Firewall” segment

– The “Hosts” segment

– And The “Notifications” segment

This was done in order to introduce further clarity into what each setting corresponds to and to make adjustments easier and less confusing than before.

Firewall

The General Settings provided under the “Firewall” segment contain relevant information for each host on the cluster as well as tools that help admins provide necessary adjustments to improve the health of both sipPROT and the Geo-IP service with greater flexibility.

Hosts

The “Hosts” segment serves the purpose of listing out relevant information on all hosts found within the cluster, containing the host name and IP address, what Kernel and sipPROT version they are running as well as the activity status of both Geo protection and sipPROT per host, and an “Actions” button that allows easy host removal for hosts with inactive sipPROT protection.

Additionally, there is a shortcut that leads to the “Attack Logs” tab at the end of each host line, providing admins with easy access to attack log activity for the corresponding host and an easier overview of attack activity.

The very top of the “Hosts” segment contains the relevant license information for added clarity on sipPROT expiry date and host allotment on the active license. 

Notifications

Finally, the added “Notifications” segment contains the SMTP setting configurations for sipPROT notifications.

These further tie themselves to a section of the “General Settings” in the “Firewall” segment where admins can designate the relevant notification recipients and the type of notification that they will receive.

That said, attack notifications will still go out, regardless of notification setting setup in this section.

SERVERware

Whereas sipPROT has received a full overhaul of its layout, SERVERware received subtler, but equally relevant quality-of-life changes to existing systems, and a few new features for users to play around with.

API Token Generation

One of the biggest additions to SERVERware’s feature list in v4.6 is undoubtedly the ability to generate user-specific API tokens with all of their permissions tied to them.

A total of 10 can be generated per user with an email notification being sent out each time one is generated for security purposes to make the user aware of potentially unsanctioned token generation activity.

The interface for this feature will display a list of all tokens tied to the user, their creation date and last use date as well as the option to revoke all tokens, or on an individual basis.

All actions performed by the tokens will be documented in the Audit Log, giving admins insight on their use and whether its purpose was abused or not in case of issues down the line.

Improved Replication Scheduling

As for the quality-of-life features, the most relevant one helps cut down time on replication scheduling by allowing admins to set up the exact time they want server replication cycles to occur with a 2 hour minimum gap between each cycle, helping them align it better to prevent extra server load during peak operating hours.

And More…

While v4.6 was more centered around sipPROT’s design overhaul, we still should not neglect the efforts that have gone into improving existing SERVERware features from our team.

Apart from the ones mentioned above like API token generation and improved replication scheduling, we have:

• The ability to edit VPS MAC addresses through the GUI

• The ability to refresh the SERVERware license through the Controller CLI

• The ability to exclude clones from backup cycles

• The ability to add users to partitions directly upon user creation

• Improving awareness of bandwidth problems during replication cycles with added notifications

• Fixes to a good number of existing bugs, improving performance for both SERVERware and sipPROT across the board

The overall changes introduced with v4.6 were intended to enhance and simplify server administration and we hope that reflects in the efforts of our teams.

We are sure to continue our efforts in developing a platform that satisfies the needs of your clients while retaining its intuitive design throughout and we are looking forward to showing you more of what we have in store, but more on that in our future releases.

Until then, we hope to have met your expectations and that both you and your clients remain satisfied.

TRY SERVERware and sipPROT 4.6

Executives at Philippine broadband provider Converge ICT Solutions have reportedly said that two major international subsea cable networks it’s participating in are behind schedule and may not be completed until next year.

According to media reports, the Bifrost Cable System and the South-East Asia Hainan-Hong Kong Express Cable System (SEA H2X) – which were originally scheduled to be finished this year – are taking longer to roll out than expected.

Business World reports that Converge CEO Dennis Anthony H. Uy said the company has had trouble acquiring the necessary permits in places like Indonesia, while Converge chief operations officer Jesus Romero said that rough weather conditions were also a factor.

Romero said the worst-case scenario is that the cables will be finished by the first quarter of 2025, adding that “it could be late this year or early next year,” the report said.

The Bifrost cable – designed with a capacity of 10.4 Tbps – aims to connect Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Guam, Mexico and California over a total span of 19,900 km, including branches. The 5,000-km SEA H2X project – with a design capacity of 160 Tbps – will connect Hainan, China, and Hong Kong SAR with the Philippines, Thailand, East Malaysia and Singapore, with options to extend to Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Malaysian peninsula.

Converge is a consortium partner in SEA H2X, along with China Mobile International, China Unicom Global, and PP Telecom. Converge joined Bifrost in 2021 after striking a deal to acquire an Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) from Keppel Midgard Holdings (KMH) for one fibre pair on the system. KMH and Converge also agreed to jointly develop the Bifrost branch that will land in Davao, for which Converge also has an IRU.