What’s up with…. Telia, Nokia, UK digital divide

• Telia hands out 5G deals to the locals
• Nokia gets a leg up from a WING deal
• BT reports some interesting research results about digital skills

Nordic action with Telia, Nokia and Ericsson and some insightful digital skills research from BT lead our news agenda today.

Telia has been sharing earnings and 5G vendor deal details today. The operator reported a dip in like-for-like revenues of nearly 4% and a slight dip in earnings, but better than the market had expected – full details of its financials are here. For its network evolution, Telia has turned to Nokia to deploy the vendor’s 5G RAN gear in Finland and its standalone 5G core system across all of its markets (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia). Ericsson, meanwhile, is the sole supplier of 5G RAN gear for Telia in Sweden and Estonia. In making these decisions, Telia will not fall foul of the Swedish regulatory ruling that disallows any 5G network deployments in that country using technology from either Huawei or ZTE. 

Still with Nokia… Service provider Smart is to use the vendor’s Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) to offer IoT services to enterprises in the Philippines. See this press release for more details.

And over at Ericsson… as well as announcing impressive third quarter financials, the Swedish vendor says it has been named as one of the “world’s most sustainable companies” by the Wall Street Journal. See this press release for more.

BT says it has conducted research that shows the pandemic is worsening the UK’s digital divide: The surprise (or perhaps not) is that it’s the younger generation that have experienced the greatest struggle. The research appears to reveal that 43% of 25-30 age group say their wellbeing has been impacted due to a lack of digital skills or online access through the pandemic, while just 10% of over 55s have reported the same. And 15% of 16-to-24 year olds reported not being confident doing their weekly food shop online, and 20% said they weren’t sure they could pay their bills online. See BT's skills programme here. This might say more about the learning curve involved in being a 16-to-24 year old in a complex world. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have been at all confident doing a weekly shopping trip for the family when I was 16.

Getting down with the cloud crowd… Synchronoss and Arthur D Little think there’s an opportunity looming for digital service providers (DSPs) with what they’re calling ‘personal cloud’ services. These services store consumer data, photos, videos, documents and so on. The research values this market as being worth $8.9 billion in the US alone by 2025. The theory is that a goodly chunk of the personal cloud services market – just 1% of which is currently captured by the telcos – can be theirs with the right approach. As the data storage requirement of the personal cloud grows beyond the free limit, many uses will be faced with a decision about whether to pay for storage from the default storage provider (most often Google), or buy new premium storage with extra security for the important stuff. This is when the DSPs can step in with high value, highly secure paid-for offering, according to Synchronoss. Find out more in this press release.

Telenor also reported its latest financials today, noting that while its revenues dipped year-on-year, so did its operating costs, leading to a 4% increase in earnings. See this announcement for more details.

- The staff, TelecomTV