News

CEO Tim Höttges announced the news at the company’s latest shareholder meeting, saying the German operator now owns 50.2% of the US giant

This week, Deutsche Telekom has announced that it has finally achieved it long-term goal of regaining a majority stake in the world’s most valuable mobile network operator, T-Mobile US.

According to Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges, the Group now owns a 50.2% stake in the business, finally achieving the majority ownership goal it first laid out during its 2021 Capital Markets Day

When T-Mobile acquired Sprint three years ago, DT’s stake in the operator stood at 43%,. Since then, Deutsche Telekom has gradually regrown its stake in the US business, reaching 49% in 2022, according to the company’s 2022 Annual Report.

Now, the company has taken the final step to increase this stake to a majority once again.

“We have the majority and are the largest shareholder of the world’s most valuable telecommunications company – T-Mobile U.S.,” announced Höttges in a shareholder meeting this week.

The cost of this increased share is reportedly less than $1 billion in 2023, with Deutsche Telekom estimating that the benefits of the transaction will be between $7.2 and $7.5 billion.

At the shareholders meeting, Höttges also highlighted the Group’s ongoing sustainability efforts, noting the progress that has been made in recent years.

“We emit 94 percent fewer CO2 emissions than in 2017. We aim to be fully climate neutral by 2025. Last year, we reduced our energy consumption in Germany by 278 gigawatt hours – that is 11 percent,” he said. “We want to achieve net zero emissions from the production of cell phones. Anyone who fails to achieve green production will eventually be removed from the line-up. We import devices. But we export our environmental protection standards.”

Deutsche Telekom is aiming for its entire value chain to be carbon neutral by 2040.

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Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
Vodafone to cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany
Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

News

The test saw drones travel between the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust sites in Coventry and Rugby, in preparation for medical deliveries

This week, BT has announced the latest steps in its ambition to help create the world’s largest drone superhighway, with a new trial seeing drones travel successfully between two Midlands hospitals.

The trial, jointly conducted by Skyfarer Ltd and Medical Logistics UK, was initiated in October 2022.

Using connectivity from BT’s network, the trial saw 130 drone flights conducted on the 32km route between the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust sites. This included travelling in complex airspace, close to urban areas.

Cumulatively, the drones in the trial travelled over 1,900km, including 220km in a single day. Over 30 hours of these flights were beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) – the first time BVLOS drone flight has taken place over-land in the UK.

As well as delivering the obvious benefits of being faster and more direct than comparable car travel between the two locations, drone deliveries will also bring major sustainability benefits; Skyfarer recorded the carbon emissions of a drone delivery as being 99.98% lower than a diesel van and 90.5% lower than an electric van.

“This trial would not have been possible without our consortium of partners. BT Group’s support has enabled a considerable amount of application learning and development, pushing Skyfarer and our consortium closer to a point where turn key long range BVLOS drone operations are an everyday occurrence,” said Georgia Hanrahan, Business Manager, Skyfarer.

“The Skyfarer and BT Group relationship will be the driving force for this revolutionary innovation and its adaption to day-to-day life. With BT Group providing the technology and communications expertise, Skyfarer is able to offer long-range BVLOS capability in return to justify and prove systems.”

BT has been increasing its activity in the drone space for a number of years now, viewing ubiquitous mobile connectivity as a cornerstone for BVLOS drone flight. In fact, last year, a consortium including the operator introduced “Project Skyway”, a plan to build a 165-mile drone corridor spanning Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby.

Since then, BT has expanded its relationship with the consortium’s leader, Unified Traffic Management (UTM) specialist Altitude Angel, by entering into a £5 million deal to help the Altitude Angel scale up its ARROW tower network beyond its initial goals outlined in Project Skyway.

According to BT, the opportunity here is enormous – in healthcare alone, the recent research suggests that commercialised drones could increase the GDP of the sector by £4 billion by 2030.

Perhaps it should comes as no surprise, then, that BT is not the only operator expanding its drone-related activities in recent years, with both Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom among the major telecoms players helping to develop this ecosystem.

How will mobile networks enable commercialised drone flight? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Connected North conference

Also in the news:
NTT and Microsoft collaborate to enhance corporate cyber resilience
Vodafone to cut around 1,300 jobs in Germany
Ofcom raise automatic compensation payments for UK ISP connectivity failures

Some metro fiber, some software-defined interconnection, some 800GE, and a significant federal contract award: … [visit site to read more]

Several interesting items from late last week that are worth keeping up with: … [visit site to read more]

Press Release

NTT Ltd., a leading global IT infrastructure and services company, today announced the launch of its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) security service to help companies achieve business performance objectives through improved cyber resilience. The cloud-native, analytics-driven offering combines human and machine expertise with leading technologies and threat intelligence to reduce the mean time to detect and respond to cyber-attacks.

The MDR service is built on Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft’s leading next-gen security information and event management (SIEM) platform, powered by AI, automation, and threat intelligence. Sentinel enables organizations to collect data at scale across all users, devices, apps, and infrastructure, both on-prem and in multicloud environments.

Using analytics, machine learning, and threat intelligence, the service hunts for suspicious activities and minimizes false positives. With built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks, enterprises can respond to incidents rapidly and remotely isolate threats.

This latest offering represents another step forward in NTT and Microsoft’s multi-year Strategic Alliance Agreement (SCA) signed in 2020. Since then, the two companies have collaborated to build advanced solutions in public, private and edge cloud, data & AI, digital & app innovation, modern workplace, and now most recently in security.

With over 25 years of Microsoft experience, including 5000+ Microsoft engineers, and more than 10,000 Microsoft certifications, NTT provides an advanced combination of application and systems integration, advisory and managed cloud, and security services that are built using Microsoft platforms and can be delivered globally.

“Organizations are typically utilizing a patchwork of security technologies that lack alignment,” said Charlie Li, Senior Executive Vice President: Managed Cloud and Infrastructure Services, NTT Ltd. “This disjointed approach has left businesses often unable to detect hard-to-find threats and lacking the necessary agility to mitigate them. Many are simply adding more security layers, increasing complexity, and generating even more logs and alerts that go untreated.”

“NTT’s MDR service helps organizations stay ahead of attackers and has a direct impact on workforce productivity and customer satisfaction through real-time and long-term threat correlation, advanced analytics, and continuous monitoring of digital transactions. It delivers a strong cyber-resilience posture, directly impacting an organization’s operational, financial, and resource resilience,” he added.

“Our research indicates that IT security professionals are in high demand, largely driven by more threats that have sprouted with the expansion of today’s hybrid workforce and the magnitude of the increased volume of digital transactions impacting businesses,” said Craig Robinson, Research VP, International Data Corporation (IDC). “MDR services are greatly assisting organizations in taking a pro-active stance to protect all forms of digital transactions and providing those organizations with high-impact, real-time, advanced analytics and professionals 24X7X365.”

“We’re extremely pleased to expand on our existing strategic relationship with NTT through the launch of the new MDR service, based on Microsoft Sentinel, to further help protect and support our joint customers,” said Csaba Deme, General Manager, Global Security Sales at Microsoft.

NTT is well-positioned to enhance its strategic partnership with Microsoft, having earned the esteemed Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider status, as well as 8 Specializations. NTT is a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) and boasts a strong legacy with over 20 Microsoft Partner Awards, including the prestigious Partner of the Year.

The global managed detection and response market size is predicted to increase from $2.6B in 2022 to $5.6B by 2027. Some of the factors that are driving market growth include shortage of skilled cyber security professionals and budget constraints, government regulations, and strict compliance for adoption of MDR services.

NTT’s MDR base service includes service tiers and deployment options, as well as support for add-ons that provide additional capabilities to expand detection capabilities and response actions. Current add-ons are MDR for Endpoint and Security Device Management (SecDM) for MDR, for Security Devices and Services.