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Reports this week suggest that Adani Group is considering surrendering it 5G mmWave spectrum after failing to turn its dream of deploying private 5G networks into reality.
According to the reports, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has sent multiple requests to the company asking how it intends to use the currently idle spectrum, as well as penalising it for failing to meet minimum rollout targets.
Adani Group purchased the spectrum for $27 million at India’s first 5G auction back in 2022. At the time, Adani said it would use the 400MHz of 26GH (also known as mmWave) spectrum to deploy private 5G networks for its own digital subsidiaries, as well as offering it to enterprise and industrial customers.
As part of the deal, Adani was obligated to begin offering commercial services using the spectrum within a year.
“The Adani Group’s foray into the industrial 5G space will allow our portfolio companies to offer a set of new add on services that capitalises on all the other digital segments we are building,” said Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, after acquiring the spectrum.
Adani Group’s participation in the spectrum auction initially caused concern in some corners of the Indian telecoms sector, with onlookers speculating that success with private networks could lead to Adani’s entry into the consumer mobile space.
The reality, however, appears to have been quite different, with Adani Group having failed to make a single deployment using the mmWave 5G spectrum.
Adani has reportedly told the DoT that the spectrum’s deployment across its own industrial operations – including ports, airports, power stations, and logistics – had proven commercially unviable.
If the company continues to fail to meet rollout obligations, the company will be forced to pay fines to the DoT. As such, Adani is considering returning the spectrum licences to the DoT.
It is also worth noting that Adani did not participate in India’s latest 5G spectrum auction, which took place in summer last year and generated a lukewarm response from the country’s mobile network operators. The acquisition of additional spectrum could have made the company’s private 5G network offering more attractive and would likely have allowed them to also offer 5G fixed wireless access services, for which mmWave spectrum is typically well suited.
Failures to meaningfully commercialise mmWave spectrum is nothing new for the mobile industry. While offering considerably lower latency and capacity than typical mid-band spectrum 5G services, mmWave’s shorter range limits often limits its viability and increases deployment costs.
Indeed, even in South Korea, typically viewed as one of the most advanced mobile markets in the world, the country’s mobile operators had failed to make mmWave commercially viable at scale. After four years of lacklustre deployments, all of the nation’s operators ultimately had their mmWave licences revoked by the government.
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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
Interesting items from the data center, interconnection, and quantum realms. … [visit site to read more]
On January 6, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced the latest wave of companies to be added the so-called ‘Entity List’.
US companies seeking to export to companies on the Entity List must first receive a specific. licence to do-so from the US government, most of which are reviewed with the ‘presumption of denial’.
This latest update saw BIS revise the Export Administration Regulations to include 13 new entities: 11 from China, 1 from Myanmar, and 1 from Pakistan. The list of companies added can be found here, while the full ‘Entity List’ can be accessed here.
The companies added are, for the most part, unsurprising. Chinese companies have made up the lion’s share of entrants to the Entity List for many years now – a symptom of the deeper of the technological tensions between the country and successive US governments. Here, the majority of the Chinese entrants are tech firms accused of supporting the Chinese military, alongside a handful of research institutes designated as working on ‘hypersonic weapons’.
The sole Pakistani entrant, Emerging Future Solutions Private Limited, was similarly added based on military connections adverse to US interests, including supporting Pakistan’s ballistic missile research efforts.
But perhaps the most interesting of the new additions is Myanmar’s Mytel, which has been accused of helping the ruling military junta prepetrate human rights abuses by assisting with surveillance and financial support.
Mytel was founded as a joint venture between the Burmese military and Vietnamese telco Viettel (itself owned by Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defence) in 2016.
The company’s military links have been a source of controversy since the company’s inception, with Mytel having been accused of corruption, cronyism, and carrying out government disinformation campaigns.
The company initially faced a broad wave of economic sanctions from various Western countries following the military coup in 2021, but the US was notably absent. Since then, the company has been accused of further misdeeds, including using Mytel SIMs to track soldiers’ movements and conversations, aiming to root out defectors.
However, exactly how effective these new sanctions from the US will be remains to be seen. The efficacy of the Entity List has been repeatedly called into question, with detractors arguing that many licences were still being issued. In 2023, for example, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul notably complained that BIS had approved more than $23 billion in tech licences to blacklisted companies in just a three month period in Jan–March 2022.
Keep up to date with all the latest global telecoms news 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
Indian space data company Pixxel says it is about to launch three of its six hyperspectral imaging satellites in a first for the private satellite market.
The satellites, part of the first network of its type in India’s private space sector, will take off aboard a SpaceX rocket from California today. The other three satellites are due to be deployed in the second quarter of 2025.
Reuters says that Pixxel’s founder and chief executive Awais Ahmed told the news service that it plans to add 18 more spacecraft to the six it has already developed.
Pixxel is a space data company, backed by Google, building a constellation of hyperspectral earth imaging satellites and the analytical tools to mine insights from that data. The constellation is designed to provide global coverage every 24 hours, with the aim of detecting, monitoring and predicting global phenomena.
Pixxel aims to use hyperspectral imaging – a technology that captures highly detailed data across hundreds of light bands – to serve a number of industries.
Its satellites can apparently deliver insights to improve crop yields, track resources, and monitor oil spills and country borders in much better detail than current technology allows.
The satellite imaging market is projected to reach US$19 billion by 2029. Pixxel hopes hyperspectral imaging could claim US$500 million to US$1 billion of this, plus additional revenue from analysis.
The company can already boast about 65 clients, some of which are paying for data from its demonstration satellites. Contracts are also in place for future data from the Firefly constellation, as it is known.
The global commercial space market is a very competitive market already, and one in which India holds only a 2% share. The hope, however, is that private players can increase this share.
As Reuters points out, Pixxel hopes to overcome these challenges with its Firefly constellation, which boasts a five-metre resolution and a 40-kilometre swathe, more, apparently, than many competitors.
A new data center market, some longhaul fiber, and a bit of managed services M&A. … [visit site to read more]
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.”
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
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]
