An IX expansion, some FTTx, and a bit of destruction: … [visit site to read more]

Airtel Africa has reported double-digit revenue growth for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, as rising smartphone adoption, surging data usage and continued expansion of its Airtel Money platform helped boost both customer numbers and profitability.

Revenue increased 31% year-on-year in reported currency to US$1.85 billion, reflecting constant currency growth of 21.1%. Mobile services revenue rose 19.1% in constant currency, while mobile money revenue grew 25.8%. Data remained the strongest-performing segment, with revenue increasing 27.2% and voice revenue growing 11.2%.

The operator’s customer base grew 11.6% to 189 million subscribers, with data customers rising 15.5% to 87.3 million. Smartphone penetration reached 51%, up from 45.8% a year earlier, helping drive monthly data usage per customer from 7.8GB to 10.6GB and increasing total data traffic across the network by 56.3%.

Airtel Money also continued its strong growth trajectory. The platform’s customer base increased 23.3% to 56.5 million, while annualised total processed value (TPV) rose 51.5% to more than US$245 billion as the company expanded digital payment services and financial inclusion initiatives.

EBITDA increased 36.6% in reported currency to US$928 million, with the EBITDA margin improving by 206 basis points to 50.1%, despite higher energy costs linked to recent geopolitical developments. Profit after tax rose to US$198 million from US$156 million in the same period last year, although earnings were impacted by a US$37 million exceptional finance cost relating to the settlement of a commercial dispute at one of its subsidiaries.

During the quarter, Airtel Africa significantly increased network investment, with capital expenditure rising to US$389 million from US$121 million a year earlier. The operator deployed more than 920 new sites – its highest first-quarter rollout on record – and expanded its fibre network to 82,100km as it seeks to improve network quality and capacity ahead of future demand.

CEO Sunil Taldar said the company had made a strong start to the financial year, with customer growth accelerating across all business segments.

He added that continued investment in the network, combined with greater use of AI and digital technologies to improve customer experience, had supported rising smartphone adoption and data consumption across its markets.

Taldar also confirmed that Airtel Africa continues to target London as the preferred listing venue for Airtel Money later this year, saying the move would provide access to international investors while helping unlock the long-term value of the fintech business.

News

Applicants must provide a compelling element of matched funding to be eligible.

This week the UK Space Agency unveiled a £42 million grant call aimed at driving innovation in satellite communications and positioning the UK as a primary supplier for global low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations.

Managed through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the third call targets key high-volume constellation technologies, including optical links, active antennas, regenerative processing, and advanced user terminals.

The agency plans to award grants ranging between £4 million and £25 million per project, with all successful applicants required to provide matched industry funding.

The first stage of applications closes on 7 September 2026, with final outcomes to be notified by December.

Some AI tools assisted in the crafting of this report.

Four projects from four parts of the world to keep up with: … [visit site to read more]

Partner Article 

If you have attended any Mobile World Congress event in recent years, you will never have been far away from a robot. From mechanical dogs prowling the halls at trade shows to robotic baristas serving coffee, robots have long been a novel way to demonstrate the power of mobile technology. 

With the advent of AI, however, the embodied AI is being springboarded towards practical deployments, with autonomous operations becoming increasingly viable. From Honor’s humanoid robot ‘Lightning’, which broke the human world record for a half-marathon earlier this year, to robot dogs helping provide security at the FIFA World Cup, the robotic era is almost upon us. AI that had once been confined to a phone or laptop screen will soon be making the leap to the physical world. 

What does that boom in physical AI mean for networks? 

At MWC Shanghai 2026’s 5G-A Industry Evolution Summit, discussions around 5G-Advanced (5G-A) were no longer focussed on simply greater speed and capacity, instead presenting the technology as a foundational layer upon which the emerging physical AI ecosystem would be built.  

But fully supporting multi-modal agents, real-time digital twins, and autonomous humanoid robotics will rely on more than a simple upgrade. Operators will be required to radically re-engineer the underlying 5G network, prioritising low latency, uplink and efficiency more than ever before.  

This paradigm shift will be a major challenge for the mobile industry, but it could offer a huge reward: the creation of a token-based business model that could lead a path to growth.  

Building symmetrical networks for happy robots  

Perhaps the most significant change represented by the advent of embodied AI is the greater demand for uplink. 

For many years, mobile networks have been designed for a downlink-heavy world dominated by consumer video streaming and web browsing. With the rapid rise of AI, however, this architectural norm is being overthrown. 

Humanoid robotics, autonomous industrial vehicles, and multi-modal AI terminals will all rely on evaluating large amounts of data – often from numerous sources in varied media – in real-time. This will require rapid compute capabilities to ensure the near-instant response times crucial for autonomous activity.  

The most basic solution for this would be to simply place the required compute capabilities on the device itself, whether that is a customer smartphone or a robotic sentry dog. The problem, however, is that running power-hungry GPUs directly on these devices destroys their battery life and commercial viability.  

“High energy consumption and the resulting short battery life is a limiting factor,” said Chen Qi, president of AI product line at TD Tech, a company she described as “a robotic brain business”. “Using a robotic brain [in the device] takes around 20-times more energy during autonomous activity than operating it remotely. We shouldn’t be putting that pressure on terminals – we should use the cloud and put that pressure on the networks.” 

Networks will therefore be required to balancing downlink and uplink, ensuring that a minimum level of uplink capacity is delivered to all connected AI terminal devices. Global operators are gradually reaching a consensus that 20Mbps uplink will become the baseline technical requirement to sustain real-time AI modelling, situational awareness, and digital twins.  

In a world full of AI terminals – 15 billion by 2035, according to Huawei’s Intelligent World 2035 report – 5G-A will be essential to ensuring that level of uplink at scale and maintaining cloud-edge synergy.  

“Scaling autonomous intelligence puts a lot of pressure on our networks,” said Yang Lifan, Deputy General Manager of China Unicom Beijing. “We can handle two cameras per robot, but what about eight? We can support five robots at the site, but what about a hundred operating simultaneously? We need to highly optimise our 5G-A networks for these conditions and that means a much greater focus on uplink.”  

It is no coincidence that Huawei launched its GigaUplink solution at the event, using multi-antenna technology upgrades and new algorithms to deliver a five-fold increase in uplink capacity. 

Beyond changes to throughput demand, the latency requirements of embodied AI are fundamentally different from consumer internet use. When a robot or autonomous vehicle interacts with human environments, it requires human-like response latencies – around 650ms – to ensure safety and precision. As a result, best-effort network delivery will soon be obsolete for B2B industrial use cases, with deterministic performance becoming an essential network feature. 

“Big bandwidth, uplink expansion, and user experience guarantee. Those will be the key network features that enable the mobile AI era,” said Eric Yang, President of Huawei Carrier Business. 

A call for Upper 6GHz spectrum 

Shifting network architecture strategy is only half of the battle for delivering continuous coverage for a rapidly AI ecosystem. Spectrum bottlenecks are a major concern, with additional capacity required to ensure ubiquitous smooth service.  

At the Summit, securing continuous midband spectrum was seen as foundational for delivering multidimensional experiences, with the upper 6GHz (U6G, 6.425–7.125 GHz) band positioned as a key resource. It offers a strong combination of both coverage and capacity, complementing existing mid-band 5G spectrum and bridging the gap to 6G.  

This call for access to U6G comes during an ongoing global debate about the future of the band. U6G is highly coveted by the Wi-Fi industry to relieve pressure on the crowded 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. However, as Tim Hatt, Head of Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence, points out “mobile is much more likely to be capacity constrained than Wi-Fi.”  

“We should actively promote U6G and align it with C-band, while refarming lower bands for even more capacity,” argued David Li, President of Huawei’s TDD Product Line. “U6G is the second-best spectrum for widespread 5G-A deployment after C-band (3.4–4.0 GHz). With improvements to our technology, we will soon be able to make the U6G coverage as good as C-band.”  

In tandem with U6G access, refarming spectrum in the legacy 2G and 4G bands will also be a priority. By pooling these frequencies through advanced carrier aggregation, they can deliver the ultra-wide bands that 5G-A demands, creating a robust foundation for mobile AI use.  

Tokens: A way out of the ‘volume trap’? 

Monetising 5G often appears to be an evergreen challenge for the mobile industry. Despite widespread 5G deployment and coverage reaching over 99% in premium testbeds like Hong Kong, global ARPU has consistently stagnated. The boom in AI terminals, however, is set to expose a fundamental economic disparity between raw data transmission and AI computational workloads.  

Under the traditional volume-based business model, operators generate minimal revenue from a gigabyte of data, even though transmitting the millions of AI tokens inside that data requires immense network resources and drives up computational electricity costs. By re-engineering network pipelines around token transmission rather than bytes, telcos can bundle, resell, route, secure, and bill for AI capacity in ways that reduce friction for customers and create new recurring revenue. 

“The industry is moving towards token monetisation models,” said Yang, noting that Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) frameworks would allow operators to offer tier-based, deterministic service guarantees based on user location, application profiles, and precise latency requirements. 

In this way, Huawei argues that operators need to evolve beyond the pure connectivity layer, becoming an orchestrator of not only data traffic but of compute power. 

“A byte-plus-token strategy will redefine commercial value for operators. In the future, the difference between data traffic and tokens will continue to grow. We must be ready to embrace that, both with how we build networks and how we monetise them,” said Li.  

Using 5G-A to embrace the future 

The consensus from MWC Shanghai 2026 suggests that an AI-native ecosystem requires a fundamental realignment of the mobile ecosystem, requiring both infrastructure upgrades and a shift to new commercial models. The additional speed, capacity, flexibility, and reliability of 5G-A – supported by additional spectrum in the U6G band – will provide an ideal foundation for the monetisation of the token economy. 

By acting as the unified orchestrators of both spectrum and computational power, telcos can step out of the volume trap and secure their place as the indispensable backbone of the physical AI revolution.

Co-location data centre services provider ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (India) has announced the launch of STT Jaipur 1, described as the first high-performance data centre in Rajasthan.

STT Jaipur 1 is being developed with an IT design capacity of 6 MW, a total power load of 10 MVA in a three-storey building with a campus area of 5,971 square metres. The facility has been designed in line with STT GDC India’s long-term commitment to sustainable and responsible growth, with a strong focus on energy efficiency, operational resilience and ESG principles. This enables customers to scale their digital operations while advancing their sustainability goals.

STT GDC India explains that as demand rises for more compute-intensive applications across industries, organisations are seeking infrastructure that can support high-performance workloads, scalable cloud environments and increasingly data-intensive use cases.

STT Jaipur 1 has been purpose-built to address these needs, providing resilient and scalable capacity for enterprises, government institutions, cloud providers and digital-native businesses in and around the region.

The launch also expands STT GDC India’s national footprint, which recently added a fourth data centre in Chennai, to ten cities, 34 data centres and 613 MW IT load capacity, reinforcing its role in extending high-quality digital infrastructure beyond Tier 1 markets and enabling emerging technology hubs such as Jaipur to participate more fully in India’s digital economy.

Mr Bimal Khandelwal, Chief Executive Officer of STT GDC India, explains: “The launch of STT Jaipur 1 represents a strategic investment in Rajasthan’s digital future and reflects our conviction that the next wave of digital infrastructure growth will extend well beyond India’s Tier 1 cities. Rajasthan is emerging as an important destination for technology-led investment and innovation. As the state’s first enterprise-grade data centre, this facility will play a pivotal role in supporting Rajasthan’s digital economy and strengthening India’s broader AI infrastructure ecosystem.”

Contributed Article

Regional operator htp built fiber–to–the–home (FTTH) networks a decade before they became mainstream. Today, it is showing the market how early builders modernize for the future. 

The operators who moved first on fiber are now facing a second strategic decision. Speaking at the BREKO Arbeitstag in a joint session with Udo Abt, senior consultant of sales engineering at Calix, Jochen Krauss, head of network planning at Hannover-based regional operator htp, explained how an early FTTH pioneer is evolving its network for the next decade. 

htp began deploying fiber to the home more than ten years ago and today serves 123.400 residential and 9.710 business customers. Sixty-three percent of its connections are now activated fiber-to-the-home lines, a penetration level most of the German market is still working toward. Originally built on point-to-point Ethernet, the network is now evolving. Today, htp is deploying native XGS-PON for all new construction and network densification. 

A business case with real numbers 

Before committing, htp ran a full total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis spanning network build and operations. The results showed a cost reduction of more than 40 percent. According to Krauss, realized savings have exceeded the model. 

The drivers are structural. Serving 2,000 subscribers on point-to-point requires around 32 rack units of central office equipment. XGS-PON requires roughly one rack unit. Power consumption per subscriber is significantly lower. Distributed splitters also eliminate many powered and cooled street cabinets, allowing the field network to run almost entirely passive. Service activation no longer requires technicians at both ends of the line. 

Why native XGS-PON 

htp evaluated GPON and Combo-PON alternatives before committing to native XGS-PON, in what Abt described on stage as “a battle of the best arguments between the two engineering teams.” Symmetric 10 Gbps capacity supports 1:64 split ratios without compromising the subscriber experience. ONT prices for XGS-PON also fell faster than any forecast predicted, closing the historic cost gap with GPON. The choice also secures the road ahead: The step to 50G PON can run in parallel on the same infrastructure when business services and backhaul demand it. 

Just as important were htp’s procurement requirements: no lock-in on optical components, open management interfaces, and hardware available for hardened outdoor deployment. Calix met all of them. 

Simplicity as strategy 

For a 250-person operator, operational simplicity determines technology choices. Because the Calix One™ platform abstracts the access technology, htp’s team configures PON services in the same familiar terms as Ethernet, and the engineer who introduced the platform completed his first test installation within just one week. Workflows are learned once; technology generations change underneath them. As Abt put it, “That is what consumers already expect from their smartphones, where 4G became 5G without anyone relearning the device.” 

The same principle extends forward. htp’s path to 50G PON, network slicing, and AI-supported predictive operations runs on the software foundation already integrated and already mastered. 

A planned evolution, not a crisis 

htp will continue operating its point-to-point base while migrating it to PON in a structured, multi-year program aligned with equipment lifecycles. New builds are XGS-PON by default. As Krauss observed, “Technology generations turning over is simply the nature of infrastructure, and the advantage belongs to operators who plan the transition rather than react to it.” 

For the many European operators now approaching the ten-year mark on their first fiber deployments, the message from the BREKO stage was clear: The second migration is coming for everyone. htp is proof it can arrive as a plan. 

Four interesting infrastructure items from around the industry: … [visit site to read more]

Interview

The Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) in-depth investigation into the proposed £2 billion merger of Netomnia and nexfibre has become one of the most significant competition cases in the UK’s telecoms sector in recent years.

Last month, the regulator confirmed it would fast-track the deal directly to a Phase 2 investigation, bypassing the initial Phase 1 review. The decision reflects the scale of a transaction that could reshape the UK’s altnet market and accelerate long-awaited consolidation.

With the investigation now well underway, Netomnia CEO Jeremy Chelot insists the merger is a necessity for securing long-term viability of the UK’s fibre market.

Consolidation is inevitable

Chelot explained the transaction was driven by the realities of the UK’s increasingly challenging altnet landscape rather than by a deliberate preference for nexfibre.

“It was not so much a choice. It was the fact that the UK market clearly needs consolidation,” he said.

According to Chelot, Netomnia had spent years exploring alternative consolidation opportunities, all of which had ultimately failed.

“We looked at quite a few players and tried to acquire companies to consolidate, and unfortunately, we failed at it. We also looked at opportunities to merge or be acquired by players bigger than us. Through those processes, Nexfibre was the only viable option from a valuation, capital, and overall perspective,” he said.

Despite the increasing pressure facing the sector, Chelot said the objective has remained unchanged since the UK’s fibre challengers first emerged.

“The goal since the beginning—and I think that’s what all the altnets had as an ambition when they started, whether you talk to CityFibre, Community Fibre, or us—was always to become a challenger and beat Openreach,” he said.

Phase 2: The sooner the better

Regarding the decision to request a move directly to Phase 2 of the CMA’s investigation, Chelot said that a swift conclusion was important not only for the deal’s viability, but also to reduce market uncertainty.

“This is a landmark, important transaction for the UK that will shape the future of broadband and telecom in the country,” he said. “If you do a Phase 1 investigation and end up going into Phase 2, you’re talking about a process that could last 18 months. Whereas if you fast-track it immediately, the process is going to be a lot shorter, giving additional time for the CMA and Ofcom to investigate thoroughly and address the important issues.”

Overcoming competition concerns

The merger has faced criticism from rival altnets, most notably CityFibre, which has raised concerns about the impact on competition and re-establishing a duopoly of BT and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2).

Chelot, however, argued that CityFibre’s comments in a recent article in The Times undermine their objections around competition.

“CityFibre was saying that they would consider being acquired by nexfibre or VMO2, but they would rather get the VMO2 traffic onto their platform. If CityFibre says that, they’re basically saying that my transaction is completely fine, because they are saying that having VMO2 traffic on their network, or being acquired by Nexfibre or VMO2, is a good [competitive] outcome,” he said.

He also downplayed concerns around network overlap between Netomnia and nexfibre, saying that fibre duplication between the two networks is limited to “a low double-digit number.”

Instead, he believes the merged business presents little risk to competition because neither Netomnia, nexfibre nor VMO2 is currently a significant wholesale provider to the UK’s largest broadband retailers. He also notes that YouFibre will remain an independent brand, hence retail competition will not be reduced.

“From where I stand, I don’t really understand where the issue is,” he said. “I’m not wholesale, VMO2 is not wholesale, and Nexfibre is not wholesale – we don’t have Sky, Vodafone, or those larger players. So, we would be increasing wholesale competition. If you look at retail, YouFibre is still there, and with a new wholesale platform, retail ISPs using that platform will become more competitive, resulting in better pricing for people.”

“The main issue is that CityFibre is just not happy, and therefore, they make a lot of noise,” he added.

The CMA’s ‘what if?’

A central consideration for the CMA will be establishing the counterfactual – what would happen had if the merger does not take place?

Chelot argues that Netomnia’s options were increasingly limited.

“Could we build a lot more homes? Where is the capital for that? Would we be a successful wholesaler with Sky and Vodafone? I tried for five years and got nowhere. Would we have merged with another altnet? I’ve been trying for years and was unsuccessful,” he said.

Commenting on these failed deals, Chelot pointed to the inherent complexity of these network deals.

“As soon as you try to [merge with an altnet with] half a million, a million, or more [premises passed], you’re most likely going to have to live with the shareholder on the other side for a very long time. That brings lots of governance issues, valuation challenges, and complicated processes.”

Funding constraints have only made those challenges more acute across the sector, with many altnets being forced to slow or even halt their deployment plans as a result.

“Finding capital to build more homes and generating the right level of return on those homes is currently next to impossible,” he said.

Building a more competitive future

Indeed, Chelot believes approval of the merger is crucial unlock a wave of consolidation that is sorely needed.

“It will signal strongly that consolidation is possible in the UK. Let’s be clear, a lot of the consolidation that’s happened so far has been out of problems or stress, rather than combining two companies that actually think it’s the right path for growth,” he said.

“I think it will spark more consolidation. We’ve seen recently that Community Fibre and Hyperoptic are up for sale. My view is that CityFibre will consolidate more – I think they will get to 8 million homes, maybe more, and to achieve that they’ll need to consolidate 3–6 players,” he added.

Speculating about the future of the UK market at the end of the decade, Chelot said the market will ultimately be dominated by four national fixed-network operators.

“I think we’ll likely have four players with national scale, with at least 8–10 million each or more: Openreach, VMO2, nexfibre, and CityFibre,” he said. “Depending on consolidation, there could even be a fifth player – maybe some kind of rural champion.”

Until this rebalancing of the market, Chelot says the altnet community must not lose focus of their original goal of competing with Openreach.

“People should talk more about the dominance of BT and Openreach. In the past 6–7 year have rolled out fibre to 25 million homes, which is more than everybody else. People sometimes think that, because the altnets occupy so much of the space it is like we won against Openreach. The fight is very much alive,” he said.

“All of the altnets were created out of a desire to challenge Openreach. Anything that gets us closer to that is a good thing,” he concluded.

How is the UK fibre market evolving? Join the industry in discussion at Connected Britain, the UK’s largest digital economy event

Ahead of the World AI Conference in Shanghai, 30 countries joined the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), an initiative proposed by China to facilitate global collaboration on AI governance.

WAICO will be headquartered in Shanghai and is intended to act as an independent intergovernmental organisation with the aim of encouraging cooperation between nations to ensure AI is beneficial, safe, and fair for all, in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter.

Among the signatories to WAICO are China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Cuba, Belarus, Serbia, and numerous other countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The organisation’s agreement enshrines the principle of open participation without conditions based on values or systems of governance, and emphasises the need to reduce the gap in access to technology between developed and emerging markets.

In an address at the World AI Conference, China’s President Xi Jinping described WAICO as a response to calls from the Global South, saying AI governance should not be a “solo performance by one country, but rather a symphony of global cooperation”. Xi framed WAICO as a forum with no barriers to entry in which members can freely collaborate on training programs, projects and governance – rather than an organisation led from the top by China.

It is significant that no major US-aligned nations were among WAICO’s founding members as this may result in a geopolitical schism in AI governance, potentially even evolving into different ecosystems of standards, infrastructure and legislation. Xi did not mention the US in his address but pointedly warned against nations “overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others”.

The idea for WAICO was first proposed publicly at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, although China was pushing the concept prior to this, arguing in its Global AI Governance Initiative that legislation must give equal weight to the requirements of development and safety.

While China has made great pains to underline that it will not lead WAICO, in practice the organisation will provide Xi with a forum to influence international standards and policy around AI as well as a vehicle through which China will be able to provide technical support to developing nations, which will doubtless strengthen its standing in the Global South as the alternative to Western-led AI initiatives. Indeed, Xi detailed that China would make 5000 AI-focused training places available to applicants from developing countries, as well as establishing cooperation centres with member countries.