Four expansion products of regional interest to catch up with: … [visit site to read more]

South Africa’s communications regulator ICASA has fined B2B telecoms provider Session Telecoms ZAR6 million (US$340,000) after finding the company misused telecoms numbering resources, violating national regulations.

The sanctions follow a complaint filed by MTN in April 2023, which alleged Session used practices including disguising international calls as local ones through techniques such as SIM-boxing and caller ID manipulation. Following a two-year investigation and hearings, ICASA’s Complaints and Compliance Committee concluded that Session had breached the country’s Numbering Plan Regulations.

The regulator said Session violated two regulations governing the use of telephone numbers and imposed separate fines of ZAR3 million for each offence.

Alongside the financial penalties, ICASA ordered the company to stop the offending practices immediately, blocked the telephone numbers involved to prevent further misuse, and said they would be withdrawn where necessary. Session must also submit monthly compliance reports, including call records and international traffic data, for the next 24 months.

ICASA Chairperson of the Numbering Plan Resources Committee, Mushi Mushi, said: « ICASA regards compliance with the Numbering Plan Regulations as essential to maintaining the integrity, efficiency and security of the national numbering system. Numbering resources are a scarce national asset and must be used responsibly by licensed operators to ensure the reliable delivery of electronic communications services. »

Practices such as SIM-boxing have long been a headache for operators across Africa. They allow international calls to be routed through local SIM cards so they appear to be domestic calls, enabling fraudsters to avoid international termination fees and reducing revenues for operators and governments. ICASA said the ruling is intended to protect the integrity of South Africa’s telecoms networks, promote fair competition

This sponsored viewpoint was authored by Bryan Lamphere, Senior Vice President of Network Planning and Engineering, Fidium

Legacy networks still function. That’s exactly the problem.

The move toward fiber-first infrastructure is already underway and accelerating. Still, some assume that because legacy networks continue to function, there is no urgency to move away from them. From an operator’s perspective, that assumption is getting harder to defend. … [visit site to read more]

Viasat has demonstrated what it claims is the first satellite voice call fully integrated into a BMW Group vehicle, highlighting how non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) could extend connected car services beyond the reach of terrestrial mobile coverage.

Showcased at this week’s 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) Meeting Week in Munich, the demonstration enabled a voice call to be initiated directly from a BMW iX3’s infotainment system using Viasat’s L-band satellite network and the NB-IoT protocol.

The proof of concept combined Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Auto 5G Modem-RF Gen 2 platform with an AI voice codec from Fraunhofer IIS, allowing compressed voice traffic to be transmitted over a geostationary satellite. The demonstration also builds on Viasat’s collaboration with software-defined vehicle connectivity provider Cubic3, whose eSIM technology enables vehicles to seamlessly switch between terrestrial and satellite connectivity.

Damian Lewis, Market Development Director at Viasat, said demand for always-on connectivity is growing as vehicles become increasingly software defined and reliant on cloud-based services.

“Vehicles are designed to be connected, and terrestrial coverage takes that quite far, but there are gaps,” Lewis said. “Using satellites to bridge those gaps and cover areas that aren’t served by terrestrial mobile connectivity is a really effective way of doing it.”

Lewis said the system uses existing NTN infrastructure, meaning automotive OEMs could deploy the technology without waiting for new satellite networks. While the current demonstration focuses on emergency voice calls, he added that future developments could support higher-bandwidth services as 5G NTN standards evolve.

BMW said satellite connectivity is becoming increasingly important as more vehicle functions move to the cloud.

“The car needs to be connected,” said Olaf Eckart, senior expert for R&D Cooperation and Partner Management at BMW Group. “Our customers want ubiquitous connectivity, and we wanted to move away from proprietary systems to interoperable and scalable solutions.”

Eckart added that narrowband IoT provides an immediate path for emergency messaging and voice services, while future 5G New Radio NTN capabilities are expected to enable higher-data-rate applications in areas without terrestrial coverage.

Thai telco True Corp announced on Thursday it has partnered with the Ministry of Public Health to launch True SkyBridge, an autonomous air logistics management platform designed to support medical drones delivering medical supplies to remote areas.

The prototype SkyBridge platform, designed and developed by True’s Research and Innovation Center, connects hospitals, medical service units, public health personnel and the public to the autonomous air logistics system underlying the drone service.

True SkyBridge supports multi-brand drones and carries full-function AI-driven flight data and safety systems over True’s network, said Ekaraj Panjavinin, head of research and innovation at True Corp.

“True SkyBridge provides end-to-end management of medical transport missions, covering route planning, medical payload quality monitoring, real-time flight tracking, fleet management and control, drone readiness and safety systems, as well as automated documentation that records the time and coordinates throughout each flight,” Ekaraj said in a statement.

True kicked off the launch of True SkyBridge with two live drone flights along different routes in the Pua District of Nan Province, which features mountainous terrain, winding roads along mountainsides and cliffs, and scattered communities, all of which are prone to heavy rainfall, landslides, or flash floods that can disrupt ground transportation routes.

For one route, a drone delivered medicine for patients with non-communicable diseases from Phaya Pha Nong Stadium to Ban Rong Ngae Community Square, then returned with medical samples. The flight covered a round-trip distance of 4 km and took approximately 3.5 minutes, 50% faster than transportation by road which takes around seven minutes.

The second route – which demonstrated the delivery of medicines to a remote area where land transport routes had been cut off – ran across steep mountains, cliffs, and dense forests from Phaya Pha Nong Stadium to Ban Nam Pua School. The round-trip distance was 46 km and took approximately 35 minutes – 70% faster than transportation by road that usually take more than two hours.

“The platform enables the fast and seamless delivery of medicines, medical supplies, and medical samples on every mission. It is also designed to provide high levels of safety and full traceability, with the potential to scale into a nationwide network in the future,” Ekaraj said.

True SkyBridge has regulatory support from the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT), Aeronautical Radio of Thailand (AEROTHAI, which provides air traffic control and aeronautical communications services) and the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC).

Narin Kalayanamit, an adviser to the public health minister, said True SkyBridge will support Thailand’s medical and public health services by ensuring that everyone has thorough, equitable, and quality access to healthcare services, particularly people in frontier, remote, and underserved areas facing medical access restrictions.

“In the past, flight trials were successfully conducted in coastal areas, which demonstrated a significant reduction in both time and constraints of maritime transportation,” he said. “Therefore, medical drones serve as another approach to elevate public access to healthcare services, while effectively enhancing readiness in handling emergency and disaster situations.”

Narin said the service will be expanded to ten additional remote areas, and further integrated into the healthcare service system.

The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has reportedly ruled that Reliance Jio’s proposal to build a domestic LEO satellite constellation to compete with the likes of Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and Amazon Leo is technically sound.

According to a report from ETTelecom published Friday, citing anonymous government sources, IN-SPACe), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) arm of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) have evaluated Jio’s plan and found it to be “on par” with systems like Starlink.

Neither Reliance Jio nor IN-SPACe have confirmed the report as of post time.

According to the report, Jio’s plan – which first surfaced last month – calls a constellation of 1,600 LEO satellites, with 32 satellites visible at any given time, while the constellation will be designed to offer a bandwidth capacity of between 4.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps. Jio is also proposing to set up at least 20 ground stations to support the LEO constellation.

The nod of approval from IN-SPACe means the Indian government can now provide regulatory support for Jio as it submits filings to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to secure the orbital slots, the report said.

While global operators like Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and Amazon Leo are building far bigger LEO constellations, Jio’s main advantage is that the Indian government is keen to expand its self-reliance strategy to the LEO sat space.

The report said that apart from finding Jio’s proposal technically sound, IN-SPACe also sees merit in the national security and strategic defence implications of not having to rely on foreign operators for LEO satellite services.

The report also claims the government is discussing whether some of the LEO satellites in its network could carry defence payloads.

The Indian government appears to be caught between its view that LEO satellites can expand broadband connectivity to underserved and unserved across the country, and its growing concerns over national security in light of its ongoing tensions with China and Pakistan, as well as growing geopolitical tensions in general.

Last month, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) expressed concerns over possible signal spillage of foreign satellite services across India’s borders, which it said raises national security concerns.

In November last year, IN-SPACe reportedly rejected applications from Chinasat, APT Satellite (Apstar) and AsiaSat to offer satellite services in India, citing national security.

Starlink obtained a GMPCS licence in June 2025 to offer satellite communications services in India, as well as authorisation from IN-SPACe. It’s already signed reseller deals with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. However it has yet to secure security clearances from the government over issues such as compliance with foreign direct investment (FDI) regulations, to cite a recent example.

Eutelsat OneWeb and SES both have GMPCS licences, the latter via SES’s satellite venture with Jio. Amazon Leo’s application for a GMPCS licence is reportedly still be evaluated by the DoT.

Two data center projects and two regional fiber buildouts: … [visit site to read more]

Contributed Article

The BoGuan LLM is enabling millions of visitors to enjoy historically accurate experiences from China’s ancient capital

Xi’an, situated in Shaanxi province, is one of the most celebrated cities in all of China. Internationally renowned as the home of the Terracotta Army, the city served as China’s capital for over 1,000 years under 13 different dynasties. Today, it is one of China’s largest domestic tourism destinations, attracting around 330 million visitors annually.

With the rapid rise of AI, the way in which tourists interact with the city is changing. As generative AI becomes increasingly commonplace, tourists are beginning to expect conversational, personalised digital experiences when visiting cultural sites. The problem, however, is that these models do not have access to specialised historical data and so cannot deliver truly unique – and historically accurate – experiences for consumers.

This is why Huawei and Shaanxi Culture Industry Investment Group (SCG) have co-developed BoGuan, the world’s first commercial multimodal large language model (LLM) dedicated to cultural tourism. The partners spent two years compiling a 1.2 Petabyte dataset consisting of 31 million images, 4.4 million minutes of video, and 960 million pieces of structured text to form a specialised foundation for the platform. BoGuan then leverages this data, acting as a unified gateway aggregating 10 open and closed-source models (including Huawei’s PanGu).

“General large models lack specialized knowledge in museology, archaeology and history, making it difficult to meet the nuanced demands of niche scenarios,” noted Edric Chu, General Manager of Huawei’s Shaanxi Rep Office. “We completed 12 high-quality cultural tourism datasets […] using Huawei Cloud Data Engineering to process and label text, images, audio and video […] Supported by three major standards of data collection, management, and circulation, the platform transforms raw data resources into data assets with verifiable ownership.”

New cultural experiences and revenue opportunities

BoGuan underpins a wide range of cultural tourism services across the province, including AI travel assistants, multilingual tour guidance, museum interpretation, AI-generated marketing content, digital preservation of cultural heritage, and short-form video production.

In the B2B sector, BoGuan powers an AI “Video Factory” that fully automates short drama and advertisement production. Meanwhile, for consumers, the model powers ‘Xiaoqi’, an AI travel companion on the GO-SHAANXI app, and the Zhiying Camera mini program, which allows tourists to instantly merge their photos with AI-generated historical settings.

Since its pilot launch in September last year, Huawei says applications powered by BoGuan have reached more than four million users, and it is already delivering a major revenue boost for SCG.

“With the same team size, thanks to these technologies[…] from last year to this June our revenue has increased by roughly 30–40%,” explained Jin Yan, Chairman of the Digital and Intelligent Culture Technology Group at SCG. “The sales of related digital collectibles and creative products have exceeded 2 million Chinese yuan ($300,000).”

SCG has already begun collaborating with tourism authorities in Xinjiang and Guizhou to replicate the BoGuan framework, with the goal of potentially exporting it nationwide in future.

Network infrastructure foundation

Of course, to successfully deploy BoGuan at scale requires powerful network and data infrastructure. Thousands of simultaneous AI interactions require both massive data throughput and dense computing capabilities.

To solve this, SCG’s runs on an on-premise 48P computing platform built with Huawei’s SuperPoD architecture. It uses Huawei’s UnifiedBus technology, an interconnect protocol for SuperPoD that interconnects physical servers so that they can learn, think, and reason like a single logical server.

At the same time, China Telecom Shaanxi and Huawei have blanketed Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall with a 5G Advanced network capable of delivering downlink speeds of 3.5 Gbps and uplink speeds of 600 Mbps. This, the partners explain, is crucial to support the scale of AI use cases being accessed throughout the region.

“The Grand Tang Mall is a textbook example of a high-traffic, high-concurrency, and high-interaction scenario, which poses an immense challenge for any network,” explained Wang Hao, Director of Mobile Communications Network Business at China Telecom Shaanxi. “Within this area […] we have deployed 46 base stations within this compact area, a density that far exceeds standard regions.”

These base stations are also equipped with AI-powered intelligent control boards that can trigger service acceleration protocols when AI photo generation is taking place.

“The embedded AI intelligently and dynamically allocates network resources to match your real-time demands,” Wang said, noting that the network can support 23,000 concurrent users during holiday traffic surges.

Bridging the AI talent gap

Beyond the technology itself, another key them to emerge from discussions about BoGuan – and about creating purpose-built LLMs for other vertical industries – is the lack of workers skilled in both AI usage and their specialist field.

“The industry faces a deficit of millions of interdisciplinary professionals who bridge the gap between cultural tourism and AI,” said Chu. “Shaanxi alone faces a talent gap of 30,000 to 50,000 in culture tourism plus AI, and the national gap is expected to exceed 1 million by 2030.”

As a result, further developing BoGuan and similar LLM projects faces a significant talent bottleneck that can only be overcome through largescale training projects.

“SCG, Huawei, and over 10 institutions have jointly established a talent training base […] aligning vocational certificates with Huawei AI certifications and university micro-majors,” explained Chu. “We expect to train over 1,000 people this year and more than 3,000 next year.”

Proof of vertical AI success

The success of BoGuan is a demonstration of how purpose-built AI models can create new revenue opportunities for telecom operators by combining connectivity, cloud, AI compute and industry expertise into a single commercial platform. Rather than competing solely on network capacity, operators must move to monetise vertical AI through managed services, industry-specific applications, and data products. With its unified AI infrastructure, platform-level scalability, and training on vertical-industry data, the BoGuan LLM helps industries tackle bottlenecks in content production, cost management, capability integration, and data security—ensuring that AI can be practically deployed to fuel sustainable business growth. This same model, in turn, serves as a blueprint for telecom operators seeking to generate lasting growth in the AI era.” Artificial intelligence is not simply a stack of technologies,” concluded Chu. “[In Shaanxi] it has become a key enabler that can activate thousands of years of cultural heritage, reshape travel experiences, and inject new momentum into the industry.”

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China’s smartphone market fell 4.3% year-on-year to 66 million shipments in the second quarter of 2026, marking a fifth consecutive quarter of decline as rising memory and component costs pushed up device prices, according to IDC.

The research firm said component prices began climbing in late March, while government subsidies that had supported demand in previous quarters started to fade. The combination weakened consumer demand and forced most Android smartphone vendors to raise prices.

Huawei and Apple were the notable exceptions, keeping market broadly stable during the quarter. IDC suggested this helped both vendors attract consumers who were hesitant to buy amid rising prices elsewhere in the market.

Huawei regained the top spot with a 22.6% market share after shipments climbed 19.4% year-on-year. Apple followed with an 18.1% share, posting 24.4% growth. Oppo and Vivo tied for third place with 16% market share despite recording shipment declines, while Xiaomi ranked fifth with 12.4%. Samsung finished 10th with just 0.1% market share after shipments plunged 60% – the steepest decline among the top 10 vendors.

First-half smartphone shipments totalled around 134 million units, down 4.2% compared to the same period last year.

“Huawei and Apple held their prices steady while competitors were raising theirs, and that gave hesitant buyers a reason to go ahead and purchase in a quarter when most of the market was giving them a reason to wait,” said Arthur Guo, Research Analyst, Client Devices Research at IDC China.

Looking ahead, IDC warned that pricing pressures are expected to intensify. Vendors have so far been cushioned by inventories of lower-cost components purchased before prices increased, but those stockpiles are being depleted. As a result, the research firm expects the year-on-year market decline to widen to around 20% in the second half of 2026.

IDC also expects 2027 to remain challenging as storage prices are unlikely to ease significantly. However, it noted that consumer demand has been delayed rather than destroyed, with a new smartphone replacement cycle expected to drive a market recovery between 2028 and 2029.