What’s up with… Marvell + Fujitsu, Telefónica, Equinix

• Fujitsu taps Marvell for 5G, Open RAN
• Telefónica seeks fibre partner, reports dip in 2020 sales
• Equinix teams with Vodafone on cable hub, unveils second green bond

Marvell’s latest RAN deal and further fibre network collaboration developments top today’s news bill. 

• Fujitsu has chosen Marvell’s OCTEON Fusion baseband processor chips for its 5G base stations and is working with the chip vendor on its Open RAN distributed units (DUs). “Marvell’s baseband technology allows us to develop a variety of RAN solutions that can address the needs of network operators, regardless of the network topology being deployed,” noted Masaki Taniguchi, Fujitsu’s Senior Vice President & Head of Mobile System Business Unit, in this announcement. 
• Like many other operators, Telefónica is seeking partners and/or co-investors for new fibre network rollouts. In discussing its fourth quarter and full year financials, the operator’s COO Angel Vila noted the operator is seeking a partner, such as American Tower, to participate in the second phase of a fibre network rollout, reports Reuters. Telefónica’s full year 2020 financials, which reflect the impact of the global pandemic (total revenues down by 3.3% like-for-like to €43 billion), are available here. 
• Data centre giant Equinix and Vodafone are to build a new subsea hub, called GN1, in the Italian city of Genoa as a landing point for the 2Africa cable system. Vodafone, which is the cable consortium's lead for European landings, will use the Equinix GN1 facility as a strategic interconnection point for the subsea cable system. The 2Africa cable will circumnavigate Africa, directly connecting 16 countries to Europe and the Middle East. See this announcement for further details. 
• Equinix has also announced its second green bond offering, totalling €1.1 billion. “The green bonds will be used to help advance the company's longstanding commitment to sustainability leadership and reducing its environmental impact,” the company noted. 
• BT is supporting Code First Girls, a UK social enterprise focused on delivering technology training for women to help close the gender skills gap in the UK technology sector. The telco says it’s pitching in cash to enable Code First Girls to provide £10,000 worth of free education to every woman undertaking a course with them and to upskill more than 900 women. The move is timely, it says, because the pandemic looks likely to have regressive consequences on gender equality due to its impact on employment and retention.
• Community Fibre, which is rolling out a FTTH network in London, says it has doubled the number of homes “enabled” in the UK capital in the past year to 200,000, which means that its infrastructure is connected to that number of residences, which can now choose a broadband service from the alternative network operator if they wish. The company is not, however, saying how many paying customers it has on its books currently. For further details, see this press release, and for background on the Community Fibre story, see this video interview we conducted last September with the company’s Executive Chairman Olaf Swantee. 
• Qualcomm, along with China Unicom and the GSMA, has been showing off the potential of 5G mmWave technology at this week’s MWC Shanghai event. The focus at the show has been on the planned use of 5G mmWave at the Winter Olympic Games Beijing, where China Unicom will be the official operator partner. For further details, see this announcement.

- The staff, TelecomTV